How do I generate all of a knight's moves?
I am writing a Chess program in Python that needs to generate all the moves of a knight. For those not familiar with chess, a knight moves in an L shape.
So, given a position of (2, 4) a knight could move to (0, 3), (0, 5), (1, 2), (3, 2), etc. for a total of (at most) eight different moves.
I want to write a function called knight_moves that generates these tuples in a list. What is the easiest way to do this in Python?
def knight_moves(position):
''' Returns a list of new positions given a knight's current position. '''
pass
Answer
Why not store the relative pairs it can move in ? So take your starting point, and add a set of possible moves away from it, you then would just need a sanity check to make sure they are still in bounds, or not on another piece.
ie given your (2, 4) starting point, the options are (-2,-1), (-2,+1), (-1,+2), (+2,+1) The relative positions would thus always be the same.