Deens Academy Math Club,
(2020)
The N-Queens Problem.
At Right Angles (8).
pp. 40-46.
ISSN 2582-1873
Abstract
The n-queens problem is a generalization of the eight-queens
problem of placing eight queens on a standard chessboard so that no queen attacks any other queen. The original eight-queens problem was first posed in 1848 by Bezzel, a German chess player, in the Berliner Schachzeitung (or the Berlin Chess Newspaper). The generalization is due to Linolet, who asked the same question later in 1869, but now for n queens on an n x n board.
The problem still retains much fascination, and continues to be studied. Why study this problem if it has already been solved? It was initially studied for “mathematical recreation.” However today, the problem is applied in parallel memory storage schemes, VLSI testing, traffic control and deadlock prevention in concurrent programming. Other applications include neural networks, constraint satisfaction problems, image processing, motion estimation in video coding, and error-correcting codes. Additionally, the problem appears naturally in biology, where it was observed that the computation involved in the analysis of the secondary structure of nucleic acids is analogous to that involved in finding solutions to the n-queens problem!
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