Lyndenlea

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

Saturday, 16th February 2013

• After continuing to suffer an unending stream of spam email through my website, in spite of the blacklist I set up in November 2009 and maintained until two years ago (hands up all those who guessed I'd soon get bored with that approach!), I've finally succumbed to the inevitability of the Turing Test. All the feedback and error reporting forms on the Lyndenlea websites now include one that I hope remains as accessible as possible while still foxing those pesky spam-bots, and to test it properly I've temporarily disabled my entire blacklist, so it had better work!
• And just to update you all on my computer reorganisation that I mentioned on 10th January – in the end I didn't need to virtualise my second computer (which has been retired as planned), and my remaining computer seems more than happy to chew both the 35³ and 37³ cubes, so for the time being all will continue as before, albeit somewhat faster in the case of the 35³ cube. The daily updates of the solution counts, however, are now triggered manually rather than automatically, so the update times will most likely vary from day to day.

For previous Site News bulletins, please see the Site News Archive.