Can You Solve This Million-dollar Chess Puzzle?
S. Himmelstein | September 02, 2017
Professor Ian Gent and Dr. Peter Nightingale challenge computer programmers to find a solution to a “simple” chess puzzle. Source: University of St Andrews
Computer programmers with a knack for chess, take heed. Researchers at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, are seeking a solution to the Queen’s Puzzle, first posed in 1850.
The puzzle originally challenged a player to place eight queens on a standard chessboard so that no two queens could attack each other. One queen must be placed in each row, so that no two queens are in the same column and no two are in the same diagonal. This has been solved by human beings, but once the chess board increases to a large size, no computer program can solve it. The researchers note that computer programs cannot cope with the vast number of options once the chess board reaches 1,000 squares by 1,000.
The financial rewards for solving the puzzle are fit for a sovereign, as the researchers suggest that the solution will be of great interest to cyber security firms and others. Oh, and there’s also the $1 million prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Peterborough, N.H.
Dr. Peter Nightingale of the university’s School of Computer Science offers a sobering comment: “However, this is all theoretical. In practice, nobody has ever come close to writing a program that can solve the problem quickly. So what our research has shown is that—for all practical purposes—it can’t be done.”
A million dollars to do the impossible seems rather a lowball figure...How about make it $100 million?
It's really not the 1 million dollar prize. It's the clear fact that you wouldn't want to solve this puzzle and if you did, you wouldn't want to tell anybody. Solving the puzzle would put you into one of two or possibly both categories :
A. The most dangerous person in the world.
B. The most protected person in the world.
In A, every government and many private individuals would send out an army of hit men to knock you off.
In B, every government in the world would put you in isolation so secure that that every hit man couldn't knock you off.
Either way, 1 million or 100 million wouldn't do you much good.
In reply to #2
Fear has never been a governing factor in my life....common sense on the other hand has had an ever increasing role over the years....I'm old, you can't threaten me with anything, because there is nothing quite as intimidating as old age...and certainly not the consequences of winning a large cash prize....haha
I worked for a company that used to say "the computer can't do it" because they had 5 digit part numbers and were unwilling to pay to change the software. This article should be more clear and say they want an algorithm that is x fast not say computers can't do it because that is patently untrue.