Solutions found so far in the 35³ chess-cube:
0
Boards placed so far: 391,835,110,568
Last updated Thu 01 Jan 2015 at 02:35:13
Solutions found so far in the 37³ chess-cube:
1,319
Boards placed so far: 1,147,185,323,253
Last updated Thu 01 Jan 2015 at 02:35:26
The "boards placed" counters are included
solely as additional indicators of our progress.
Where mathematics and logic meet over a friendly board game.
I blame my Dad, Colin, for this. Since he first started writing computer programs way back in 1975 he's been intrigued by the age-old Eight Queens Puzzle of how to get eight chess Queens onto a standard 64-square (8 by 8) chessboard, such that no Queen can be captured by any other using the standard chess Queen's moves. Put simply, no two Queens may share the same horizontal row, vertical column, or diagonal.
Actually, that wasn't enough for my Dad. He's also been extending that puzzle onto different sized "chessboards", both bigger and smaller (but always square), hunting for solutions to the more general n Queens on an n by n chessboard puzzle. More recently he's been focusing on finding just the first possible solution to the puzzle for the various sizes of chessboard. And now I've caught the bug too (darn it).
What's more, neither of us actually plays chess!
So what's on this website? First of all, there are the results of that hunt for the "first solutions" to The N Queens Puzzle, along with an explanation of how we did it. We aim to generate a full set for all chessboard sizes from 1 by 1 to 50 by 50 (a nice round number), and we now only have two left to complete, so watch this space...
Another extension that Dad has always been keen to investigate is how to take the puzzle Beyond The 2nd Dimension – specifically, to find out how many Queens you could get into a three-dimensional n by n by n "chess-cube". My ability to mentally picture and manipulate such things not only helped us to come up with an ingenius way of finding solutions to the 3D puzzle, but also inspired me to delve even further into the fourth dimension and beyond. Our progress finding 3D solutions can be tracked with the counters in the top-right corner of this page.
Take a look at Dad's own CSP Queens website to read his thoughts on our investigations into this puzzle.
Latest Site News
Sunday, 13th December 2015
- It's incredible how errors can go undetected for years before someone spots them. Thanks to an eagle-eyed visitor today, the solution for the 12 by 12 chessboard now has all its Queens in the correct squares; somehow the one in Row 11 was misplaced in Column 6, when it should have been in Column 9. Evidently a typing error as our processing results have always been correct.
- I'll also take this opportunity to highlight the fact that we stopped processing the 35³ and 37³ chess-cubes on 1st January 2015. There seemed to be no obvious end in sight for either the complete set of solutions in 37³ or any solutions in 35³, at least not within any reasonable time-scale. My apologies for taking nearly a whole year to mention it.
For previous Site News bulletins, please see the Site News Archive.
