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posted by martyb on Saturday September 02 2017, @09:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the simple!=easy dept.

Researchers at the University of St Andrews have thrown down the gauntlet to computer programmers to find a solution to a "simple" chess puzzle which could, in fact, take thousands of years to solve and net a $1M prize. Computer Scientist Professor Ian Gent and his colleagues, at the University of St Andrews, believe any program capable of solving the famous "Queens Puzzle" efficiently, would be so powerful, it would be capable of solving tasks currently considered impossible, such as decrypting the toughest security on the internet.

Devised in 1850, the Queens Puzzle originally challenged a player to place eight queens on a standard chessboard so that no two queens could attack each other. This means putting one queen in each row, so that no two queens are in the same column, and no two queens in the same diagonal. Although the problem has been solved by human beings, once the chess board increases to a large size no computer program can solve it.

The team found that once the chess board reached 1000 squares by 1000, computer progams could no longer cope with the vast number of options and sunk into a potentially eternal struggle akin to the fictional "super computer" Deep Thought in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which took seven and a half million years to provide an answer to the meaning of everything.

https://phys.org/news/2017-09-simple-chess-puzzle-key-1m.html

[Abstract]: "Complexity of n-Queens Completion"

[Source]: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2017/title,1539813,en.php

Any takers for this challenge?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @01:53PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @01:53PM (#562917)

    Zeno: the Original Troll [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Saturday September 02 2017, @07:25PM

    by Bot (3902) on Saturday September 02 2017, @07:25PM (#562989) Journal

    The easy to troll troll, too.
    *Slap*
    Zeno turns around facing his disciples: "alright, who slapped me?"
    The disciples: "zeus did. No mortal hand can reach your enlightened buttocks because it would need to reach the halfway point first and to do that...."

    --
    Account abandoned.