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 1976 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 three 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...
Take a look at Dad's own CSP Queens website to read his thoughts on our investigations into this puzzle.
Latest Site News
07 August 2010
- Time for a quick update on my spammers blacklist. I've been adding IP addresses to it gradually over the last nine months and I'm now blocking no less than eighty-four! In a few cases, however, the same subnets have kept popping up, so I've adapted my code to also check against a new list of twelve subnets - all belonging to the same hosting company based in Belize, as it happens. As it's a hosting company rather than an ISP I can only assume their servers are being used as proxies by the spammers, so I doubt very much that I'm blocking any legitimate users.
For previous Site News bulletins, please see the Site News Archive.
