The principal of the American Institute of Architects, Dean Britton is responsible for sourcing new ground lease projects and negotiating with developers and investors. In his free time, Dean Britton enjoys playing chess.
Chess has been used to explore mathematical puzzles for hundreds of years, with mathematicians proposing new configurations and logic problems since its adaption in the 15th century from a similar Indian game. In 1848, a German chess magazine proposed the Eight Queens puzzle. Was there a way to arrange eight queens, the most versatile piece in the whole game, so that none can be safely attacked by any other?
A few years later, the puzzle was solved with 92 distinct solutions, but the chess puzzle solvers were seemingly not satisfied with the easy answers. In 1869, the meme mutated, and players began wondering, “if you had a 1000 x 1000 chessboard and 1,000 queens, would it be possible to arrange them to put none of them in danger of being taken by another queen?”
The answer to the problem was discovered in 2022, over 150 years later, using modern computing technology to develop an algorithm that could solve the puzzle. Fellows at Harvard University approached the puzzle as an optimization problem, seeking the most efficient solution and working their way through using trial-and-error.
The solution took five years to devise and still is not necessarily perfect, yet it is the closest a puzzle of this magnitude has come to being solved. For perspective, a 1000 x 1000 chessboard has 1431000 possible combinations. The head researcher, Michael Simkin, says he doesn’t want to look at a queen piece for a while.
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