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 November 2009
- Whilst writing an email to me about my websites earlier this week my Dad inadvertently spotted some news missing from the Site News Archive on the Queens On A Chessboard site. It turns out that the same minor code error would have affected the first Site News Archive page on any future Lyndenlea website too, but not on sites that existed before I added the Site News feature. Anyway, I've now fixed it, and while I was there I also updated the code behind the list of links to previous years' news (which doesn't yet appear in the Queens site's Archive because it wasn't launched until this year) to better cope with different screen widths.
- After almost two years I've decided to swap around the Latest Site News so that the most recent bulletin appears last, the same as in the Site News Archive. It just makes more sense that way around. This feature otherwise continues to work in exactly the same way that it always has, showing the most recent news bulletin along with any other bulletins that were published in the preceeding seven days.
10 November 2009
- It seems that the website of the NQueens@Home Project has disappeared from the Internet, so I've removed the link from my The N Queens Puzzle page. I can only assume that the entire project has died, which would be a great shame, but I'll keep an eye on the situation and if it comes back online I'll restore the link.
For previous Site News bulletins, please see the Site News Archive.
