Puzzle Description:

4 sets of traditional 8 queens on a 8x8 chessboard. No one queen of a particular color can attack another queen of the same color. This is in response to #6435 of course.

#1: Meg Smith (Mamadragonfreak) on Aug 5, 2009

as i commented on #6435 there are probably hundreds of ways to do this...and - fyi - i don't intend to do it hundreds of times

I had a hard enough time coming up with one way to get the traditional 8 queen puzzle on there 4 times (about 40 minutes). I will only be doing this one. :)

This puzzle differs from #6435 in that one queen cannot attack another queen. In #6435, they can attack along the diagonals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_queens_puzzle

not a typical puzzle for you. Now I'll have to look at puzzle 6435 and see your inspiration.

If you have not done the eight queens puzzle before, it might be hard to understand. What 6435 did was make it so that a queen was only in one column or row. But on the diagonals, they could still attack (we are talking chess here of course) each other. This violates the "traditional" eight queens puzzle.

So, I was curious if it was possible to place the queens on the board such that they could not attack each other, even on the diagonals. After spending about 30 minutes trying to place 4 sets of 8 queens, I found one way to do it; however, the puzzle ended up being a multiple solution puzzle. So, I finally came up with a puzzle about 10 minutes later that could be solved.

Back in the late sixties my final project in a computer course was to use Fortran to program our computer at school (took up a whole [air-conditioned]room)to solve the Eight Queens chess puzzle. Lol...I carried shoeboxes filled with my punched cards around for days lest someone disturb their order.

...and does anyone remember programming with(punched)paper tape???

I was just going to say that if I had been creating a puzzle like this, it wouldn't have been long before I sat down and wrote a program to create it. Placing 8 queens is a classic computer programming problem, and placing 4 sets of 8 queens wouldn't be all that different.

#5 - Sorry to say this was before my time. I started programming on a Commodore 64 (before I knew what programming was).

#6 - I did think about it. :)

JoDeen, it was considered quite special to be able to run your manila cards through the card reader and end up with a punched tape- in various pastel colors. And the box that caught the little "confetti" was fair game for dumping in someone's hair. Can you just imagine how pretty that looked all scattered through a great big natural afro?!? Thanks for the puzzle, and the memory.

interesting solve

Fun challenging solve!
I thought your puzzle was to test my color logic abilities! :)
After, reading the comments I see what your goal was.

Well perhaps it has two goals... :)

Probably the hardest 8x8 I've ever seen!

JoDeen - I started with computer programming in 1963 with a mainframe as big as my current house.

Judy - My dad is an electronics engineer who likes to tell stories of the old giant mainframes. I've already started my Christmas shopping and part of my dad's gift this year is a tiny piece of PCB from the original CRAY-1. Thought he'd find it interesting :)

Goto next topic

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