Solutions found so far in the 35³ chess-cube:
0
Boards placed so far: 93,359,423,733
Solutions found so far in the 37³ chess-cube:
17
Boards placed so far: 199,109,507,860
The "boards placed" counters are included
solely as additional indicators of our progress.
These counters are automatically updated daily.
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 November 2011
- Even with the number of boards placed fast approaching 30 billion, the big fat zero on the Home page that's supposed to be counting 35³ cube solutions really isn't very interesting, is it? Well, I didn't think it was, so I've augmented it with another pair of counters for the 37³ cube. This being a prime numbered cube it will definitely give us something – and in fact it already has, as you can see by the just as big (but not at all fat) and far more interesting "one" on its solutions counter. Don't worry, the number of boards placed will soon catch up – the 37³ cube is currently running more than three times as fast as the 35³ cube at around 12,300 boards placed per second.
- Elsewhere, I've added to the 3D Solutions So Far page a full and detailed explanation of my clever shortcut to generating these larger cube solutions, complete with no fewer than nine new chessboard diagrams!
- And to make those new chessboard diagrams (and all the old ones, too) even easier to comprehend, I've toned down the green squares a little as I was finding the enormous "first solution" diagrams in particular were making me go ever so slightly cross-eyed...
For previous Site News bulletins, please see the Site News Archive.
