Hi, I'm Miles.

Proud creator of KnightPuzzle.com and avid fourteen-year-old programmer from South Yorkshire, UK.

Opening Moves

When I was seven, I got into chess thanks to an Usborne beginner's guide. One page really stuck with me—a diagram showing how a knight on a 3x3 grid could never reach the centre square. That little fact blew my mind. I started doodling my own puzzles, challenging my family to solve them. To my surprise, they actually enjoyed it! So, I kept going, making trickier and trickier knight-based challenges.

Where it all began...

Knights in the Making

Fast forward a few years, and I became obsessed with coding. It started with Scratch, but with some encouragement from my dad, I moved on to actual programming. By 13, I had developed a Python program that could randomly generate knight puzzles. The problem? Some were impossible to solve, while others had multiple solutions. I needed puzzles with only one correct path.

The first designs take shape!

A Knightmare in Code

By Christmas 2023, inspired by my HTML lessons at school, and spurred on by the support of my computer science teacher, I had a new idea: what if I turned my puzzle into an online game? Something like Wordle, where a fresh challenge appears each day. That's when the real puzzle began—building a puzzle generator that worked properly. I tried everything, even brute force, making my computer cycle through billions of grid combinations. (Spoiler: that did not go well.)

Checkmate!

After six months of frustration, inspiration finally struck during a tediously long summer holiday drive across France—the kind where the scenery blurs, time drags, and there’s nothing to do but think. As soon as I got home, I rushed to code it—and it worked! Finally, the generator produced unique, solvable puzzles, all with one correct solution.

From there, I kept adding features: streak tracking, dark mode, hints and results feedback, all designed to keep players coming back for a daily knight puzzle challenge.

And that's how KnightPuzzle.com came to be. Hope you enjoy playing as much as I enjoyed making it!

Rotate to portrait mode