Sunday, February 06, 2005

A Little Puzzle

Just few days ago, I was working on some sort of a puzzle published by the chess club in our university, the puzzle was:

"How can you place 8 pawns on a chess board such that none intersect vertically, horizontally, or diagonally?"

Sitting down working on it, some friends passed by and asked for what I was doing, and knowing that it was a puzzle they immediately joined trying to get it solved.

We spent about 20 minutes trying arrangements, but none succeeded, so I decided to code a program to solve it. I left the guys with the puzzle and went to the computer lab and started making a program to solve it, yet five minutes later one of the guys called and told me he did solve it finally! I quitted the program and went to check the so-wanted solution. It was great!

One further question was to be answered: "How many different solutions do we have?".

What we thought of is that you can rotate the solution 3 times to get 4 different arrangements while still not breaking the rules, so the answer would probably be 4 possible arrangements.

Anyway, 2 days later I finished the program and started the search, the program came out with 92 different solutions!!!
That means, neglecting rotated copies of arrangements, we have 23 possible solutions for the puzzle!!

Try doing the puzzle yourself, and if you have time, download my little Chess Puzzle Solver utility (14 Kb).

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