The knight’s tour problem is a famous mathematical/computer science problem that tries to find the least number of steps required for a knight on a chess board to visit all the squares on a chess board. Various versions of this problem exist and they usually change in the size of the board, type of the board or method of solution. (See r/AnarchyChess)
My mother randomly asked this Sunday afternoon if she can quiz me about something. And she asked me what are the minimum steps a knight must take to visit all the squares on a chess board. I was stuck and didn’t even know how to start to solve the problem. And I asked ChatGPT before googling it. (See this). It gave me a bunch of algorithms and spewed out a lot of complicated words that seemed to be linked to Statistics. And before I could give a reasonable answer mom tells me that there’s a sanskrit verse that solves this problem that was written in 9th century by someone called Rudrata in his book Kavyalankara. And then I googled it and read the wiki. I’m not going to pretend that I understood the solution or even the logic.
Then the conversation strayed afar. My mother teaches Sanskrit and is very good at it. She told me that she knew about the existence of the problem and the solution for years. But she told me that she was asking herself why she never mentioned it to me. We talked about whether a person enjoying a piece of art or culture bears the responsibility of promoting or preserving it. And that sent me thinking.
Consider the case of Sanskrit. It is a rare language. A lot of people are offended when I say so. Including my mom. But the number of people who speak Sanskrit is very low and new academics who are signing up to study it is not increasing. My mom disagrees. She works everyday to promote it, preserve it and cherish it. She is at an age where she is starting to forget what she studied in her college and she is terrified that she will not be able to give this brilliant language the attention it needs.
But how much responsibility does one have? People experience so much throughout their daily lives without realizing that they’re making history. They repeat things, do things for the first time or even the last time but everything they do is a part of history. Whether or not someone else notices it is another question. But through these activities people also experience unique activities or pieces or art/culture that are specific to their region, language etc. Do they bear the responsibility to promote it? Is it okay to enjoy it as is? What about preservation? It reminded me of one of John Green’s video essays/ramblings called “Empathy and its limits” in which he says that “over a 150,000 people are gonna die today, and if I felt as strong about all of their deaths as I would about a death in my family, I wouldn’t be able to function, right? So I understand that empathy needs to have limits, but like, I feel like my empathy is too limited.”
I feel like my empathy is too limited.”
I guess the real Knight’s tour problem is not the piece of wood moving across the chess board, but the incredible people who preserve our culture by carefully taking care of it and promoting it by visiting/touching as many lives as possible. For me it represents the incredible responsibility people like my mom feel about the preservation of their culture and identity.