LONDON: According to scientists who have issued a challenge that they believe no one will ever be able to complete, the “Queens Puzzle” is a difficult chess problem that can be solved by writing a computer program. If you are successful in solving this problem, you will be awarded one million dollars. In the original version of the game, which was created in 1850, a player was tasked with placing eight queens on a traditional chessboard in such a way that none of the queens could fight one another.
This indicates that there should only be one queen in each row, and that no two queens should be in the same column or on the same diagonal. Even though the issue has been resolved by people, there is no computer software that can do so after the size of the chess board has been increased to a significant degree.
Researchers from the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom believe that any computer program that is able to solve the well-known “Queens Puzzle” would be so powerful that it would be able to solve tasks that are currently thought to be impossible, such as decrypting the internet’s most stringent security measures.
They discovered that after the chess board had 1,000 squares by 1,000 squares, computer programs were no longer able to deal with the large amount of choices and sank into what may be an everlasting conflict.
According to the researchers, the challenge is comparable to that faced by the fictional “super computer” Deep Thought in the popular science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which took seven and a half million years to provide an answer to the question “What is the Meaning of Everything?”
According to Ian Gent, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, “if you could create a computer program that could solve the issue incredibly rapidly, you might modify it to tackle many of the most critical problems that touch us all on a daily basis.”
“This involves difficulties as insignificant as figuring out the biggest group of your Facebook friends who do not know each other and as significant as breaking the codes that protect all of our online transactions,” Gent continued.
According to the findings of the study, the complexity of these issues makes it difficult for computer programs to solve them since there are so many different paths to take into consideration that the process might take several years. According to them, this is because they utilized a technique called “backtracking,” which is a programming approach that involves considering every conceivable alternative and then “backing away” from that option until the appropriate answer is discovered.
“On the other hand, all of this is just theory; in reality, no one has ever come close to building a program that can solve the issue in a timely manner. Therefore, according to the findings of our investigation, it is not possible to accomplish this goal under any realistic circumstances “Peter Nightingale, a senior research fellow at the University of St. Andrews, made this statement. Anyone who is able to decipher the riddle and answer it will be eligible to receive the one million dollar reward that is being offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States.
Published at : 29 Aug 2022 09:52 AM (IST)