Solving the eight queens puzzle

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In the eight queens puzzle, you need to place eight queens on a chessboard so that they aren’t attacking eachother. It has 92 solutions.

I implemented one method for solving the problem. It works for any nxn chessboard, but it’s not so fast with large boards.

You can invoke this with java -jar Queens.jar for an 8×8 board, or java -jar Queens.jar n for an nxn board with n queens.

It works by processing the board in vertical strips, first placing a queen in the top-right, and then attempting to place a queen in the second column at the first available space. Once it crosses the board like this, it has found a solution, but it goes through plenty of bad combinations first.

Update: online solution-viewer is now running to make that command-line output more useful.

Write something on a chessboard

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I’ve put together a little algorithm called chess104. It will let you encode data as positions of chess pieces (104 bits of data, hence the name).

That works out to 20 characters using a squashy 5-bit encoding, but there are other options too if you really feel the need to write "COFFEE" in efficient hexadecimal.

If I can find a speedy way to encode more data, there might be a sequel to this. 104 bits is nowhere near the limit, but my other ideas were too much for my netbook to handle (presumably that makes them bad candidates for running as a web app).