Delivered to the St. Petersburg Academy October 17, 1776. Originally published as De quadratis magicis, Commentationes arithmeticae
Melancholia di Dürer (1514) include il quadrato magico di ordine 4 con somma 34 ritagliato sotto il titolo di questa pagina.
Magic squares are rather old. According to legend the first known magic square was discovered by Emporor Yu in China about 2200 B.C. When he was walking on the banks of the Loh river, he saw a mystical turtle with some dots within squares on its shell.
The very first textual reference can be found, however, in the writings of Zhuang Zi (369-286 B.C.). In this representation, the odd numbers are represented by white dots (Yang symbols) and represent the sky, while the even numbers are shown as black dots (the Yin symbols), the symbol of the Earth.
Quadrati e cubi magici sono straordinarie configurazioni numeriche, di grande tradizione. Ai confini tra il gioco e la matematica, sono un’affascinante sfida alla nostra intelligenza.
Objective is to drag bi-colored tiles forming a squared pattern on given board positions to match certain requirements as listed below. The size of the squared board is measured by its width in tiles. So if it is eight tiles wide and high the squared board has 64 positions. The amount of available different colors in the color palette matches the size of the board. Each of the rectangular shaped unique tiles has two combined attributes: a frame color and an inner color.
The following notes describe, to the best of my current knowledge, the main results (and a few sideshows) that have been achieved in the study of knight's tours and related questions.