The eight queens puzzle asks how eight chess queens can be placed on a standard eight-by-eight chessboard so that no two queens threaten one another, meaning no two queens may share a row, a column, or a diagonal. The puzzle was first posed in the mid-nineteenth century by the chess composer Max Bezzel, who published it in 1848, and the mathematician Franz Nauck published the first complete solutions two years later in 1850, going on to extend the problem into the more general n-queens problem for boards of other sizes. There are ninety-two distinct arrangements that satisfy the puzzle's conditions. In the modern era the puzzle has become a standard example in computer science teaching, most notably when Edsger Dijkstra used it in 1972 to demonstrate structured programming and depth-first backtracking search techniques, and it remains a common exercise for illustrating combinatorial search algorithms today.
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1. Eight queens puzzle (Wikipedia)
Lead paragraph
is the problem of placing eight chess queens on an 8×8 chessboard so that no two queens threaten each other
Origin details
Chess composer Max Bezzel published the puzzle in 1848
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