Peter Alfeld, --- Department of Mathematics, --- College of Science --- University of Utah

The N by N Queens Problem

In chess, a queen can move as far as she pleases, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. A chess board has 8 rows and 8 columns. The standard 8 by 8 Queen's problem asks how to place 8 queens on an ordinary chess board so that none of them can hit any other in one move.

Besides being an amusing puzzle this problem is interesting because kids love it and it's a great teaching tool in the upper grades of Elementary School. It also provides great programming exercises.

One solution - the prettiest in my opinion - is given in the figure nearby. It turns out that there are 12 essentially distinct solutions. (Two solutions are not essentially distinct if you can obtain one from another by rotating your chess board, or placing in in front of a mirror, or combining these two operations.)

Even though the solution shown here looks pretty natural and straightforward, it is not that simple to find any others, or even this one if I hadn't displayed it here. As an exercise you may want to find the other solutions. If you are impatient, you can look them up by clicking here. Our particular solution is configuration 10.

An obvious modification of the 8 by 8 problem is to consider an N by N "chess board" and ask if one can place N queens on such a board. It's pretty easy to see that this is impossible if N is 2 or 3, and it's reasonably straightforward to find solutions when N is 4, 5, 6, or 7. The problem begins to become difficult for manual solution precisely when N is 8. Probably the fact that this number coincidentally equals the dimensions of an ordinary chess board has contributed to the popularity of the problem.

The interactive applet on this page let's you find solutions of the N by N Queen's Puzzle for arbitrary values of N. You may find it interesting to watch your computer find the solutions.

When you first click on the applet you should see a control panel looking just like this one (which is an ordinary gif image - clicking on it will not accomplish anything.) You should also see a drawing frame that contains an 8 by 8 chess board much like the one exhibiting the example solution above. You can use the applet to compute more solutions at various levels of animation (and correspondingly reduced levels of speed).

The Algorithm

When a solution has been found it can be displayed in its own window. Currently the program does not eliminate solutions that can be obtained from previous ones by rotations or reflections.

A measure of the difficulty of the problem is given by the number of moves the above algorithm takes to find the first solution. This number of course tends to go up as as N increases, but it does not increase monotonically. The Table nearby gives the required number of steps. It is ordered by increasing difficulty. So the easiest board to find a solution on is the 5 by 5 board, and the 22 by 22 board is about 65 times as hard as the 23 by 23 board, and about 41,000 times as hard as the 8 by 8 board.

Using the Control Panel

1. Row 1.
   • Naturally, the Quit button lets you quit the program. You can also exit by clicking again on the applet, by typing 'x', 'X', 'q', or 'Q' in the control window, or by quitting your browser. You can dismiss a single solution or the drawing window by typing 'x', 'X', 'q', or 'Q' in the relevant window. (If you dismiss the drawing window accidentally and you want it back use the Draw button, see below.)
   • The Reset button stops any computation in progress and resets the board to the initial configuration with a single queen in the upper right corner.
   • The Draw Button redisplays the Drawing window if it has been previously dismissed. It also updates the display of the current configuration in the drawing window, and the display of the step count on the control panel.
   • The STOP button interrupts any computation in progress, but it does not reset the board.
   • The green buttons Step, Next and All let you find more solutions. Step moves a queen in the current configuration, Next finds the new solution, and All finds all solution. Caution: Using the All button with each solution displayed on a new board can fill your screen very quickly with new windows showing new solutions and cause your system to run out of memory or into some other limit. For every new solution the program pauses for the time indicated in the delay Text Field. This gives you a chance to type 's' or 'S' in any displayed solution, which will stop the production of new solutions. The control window will also stay on top of the solution windows so that you can stop or quit.
   • The text label shows the number of moves made so far on the board. It is green when the program is waiting for your instructions, and red when it's working on a computation.
2. Row 2.
   • The red textfield let's you change the value of N , the dimension of the chess board. You can decrease or increase N by clicking on the "<" or ">" button, respectively.
   • The Display Menu let's you determine the degree of animation on the drawing board. There are four levels, ordered by decreasing animation and increasing speed:
     1. Demonstrate shows queens being moved, and has a ghost queen move from any queen that can hit the recently moved queen in the rightmost column.
     2. Show: Queens that can hit each other are rendered in grey.
     3. Move Queen: The queens move, but there is no indication which can be hit. This is the default setting.
     4. Results only Only new solutions are displayed (in their own windows or in the drawing window).
3. Row 3. The Text Field labeled square shows the size of the chess squares (in pixels). You can change that number to adjust to larger or smaller values of N. The green "<" and " >" buttons decrease or increase the square size by 1. The delay in milliseconds is applied during any animation. The "<" and ">" buttons decrease or increase the delay by approximately 20 percent. Choosing 'Result only' in the display menu causes the delay to be applied only when a board with a new solution is being displayed.
4. Row 4. This row lets you display all distinct solutions for N=4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, and the first solution found by the algorithm for values of N larger than 9. The menu let's you decide whether you want to see each solution in the general drawing area (the default) or in its own display. (This setting also applies to solutions found by the program by searching.) The plus and minus buttons let you scroll up and down the list for a given value of N. You can also change the value of N by using the "<" or ">" buttons. To get any display click on plus or minus, or type a return in the text field.
5. Row 5. As usual, I update the version number whenever there is a significant change. The run number indicates how often the program has been run since November 30, 1996.

Running Standalone and Downloading

• Queens.class
• ControlQueens.class
• DrawQueens.class
• Board.class

When you click on these links (which point to binary files) you'll probably see something strange on your system. However, you should be able to download the files properly in spite of their appearance.

Queens is the class that calls all others. To run the software in standalone mode on a Unix system just type java Queens in the directory that contains your class files. If you want to base an Applet on your files make sure you specify the code base (the directory containing your class files) similarly as in the html code of this page. The code base must be accessible over the net, otherwise you get a security exception and things don't work right.

If you do download the software I invite you to let me know so that I can put you on my mailing list and inform you about future improvements. Of course, also let me know if you have any troubles.

There is no help information built into the program. This page is intended to be the documentation for the program. So you may want to copy the page, print it, or provide a link to it.

Notes

• The main point of the applet on this page is to illustrate the computer search. However, given any size chessboard it is possible to find a solution without searching. Click here for an illustration.

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