♞ Knight's Travails

---

📖 Overview

Knight’s Travails is a pathfinding challenge that simulates a knight's movements on a standard 8×8 chessboard. The knight can move in “L” shapes, and this project calculates the shortest path it can take from a starting square to a target square using Breadth-First Search (BFS).

This project demonstrates how graph traversal algorithms and core data structures like arrays and objects can be applied to real-world problems.

---

🧠 What This Project Teaches

• Thinking of a chessboard as an implicit graph
• Applying Breadth-First Search (BFS) to find shortest paths
• Using queues, visited tracking, and path reconstruction
• Embracing problem-solving with only core JavaScript constructs — arrays, objects, factory functions

---

🚀 Getting Started

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/singharyan006/knights-travails.git
cd knights-travails

2. Run the test script

node test.js

---

3.💡Sample Output

You made it in 2 moves! Here's your path:
[0,0]
[1,2]
[3,3]

You made it in 6 moves! Here's your path:
[0,0]
[2,1]
[4,2]
[6,3]
[7,5]
[5,6]
[7,7]

---

⚙️ Tech Used

• JavaScript (ES5+)
• Node.js (runtime to test the script)
• No external libraries — only core JS features

---

🧩 Real-World Relevance: DSA in Action

This project shows how Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) solve real-world problems:

• 🧠 Graphs model relationships between locations (like maps, boards, networks).
• 🚀 BFS finds optimal routes — just like in GPS apps, logistics systems, or multiplayer game AIs.
• 📥 Queues simulate step-by-step exploration — useful in simulations, scheduling, and job processing.
• 🔄 Visited tracking prevents loops — crucial for memory optimization and performance.

By solving the knight’s traversal problem, we simulate the kind of logical reasoning used in:

• 🗺️ Route optimization
• 🧠 AI decision-making
• 🎮 Game development
• 🌐 Networking and pathfinding systems

---

🔮 Future Improvements

• ✅ Add CLI input using readline-sync to allow custom user input
• 🔄 Add a visual board representation (text-based)
• 🧪 Write unit tests for core logic using Jest
• ♻️ Animate paths step-by-step in the console
• 🌐 Build a web-based UI version using React or Canvas
• 📦 Refactor into modules with a more scalable architecture

---

---

🧑‍💻 Author

Built with ❤️ by Aryan Singh
Project built as part of The Odin Project

---