Starting with an ordinary 8x8 chessboard, perform a series of shifts to move all the black and white squares into contiguous colors. A "shift" is a push of one row (A-H) from left to right, or one column (1-8) from top to bottom. When a row is shifted right, the square shifted out is moved to the far left to keep the 8x8 square. Similarly, for a column shift, the square shifted out is moved to the top.
What is the fewest number of shifts needed to make all the black squares be contiguous and all the white squares be contiguous? What is the fewest number of shifts needed to just make a contiguous group of black squares?
Source: Original.