As I recall, the problem has 64 possible starting points and 64 possible 
solutions. The program let you input a position and the printed a 
representation of the solution on a terminal... 8 rows of 8 characters. 
LISP is well suited to that sort of thing with recursion but my brain is 
not!

John Ferrell    W8CCW

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do 
nothing." -- Edmund Burke
http://DixieNC.US

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Olin Lathrop" <olin_piclist@embedinc.com>
To: "Microcontroller discussion list - Public." <piclist@mit.edu>
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008 11:40 AM
Subject: Re: [EE] Is your next language COBOL?


> John Ferrell wrote:
>> That brings to mind a Lab Project I did in the mid 1980's. The
>> problem was to place 8 Queens on a chess board with no jeopardy, a
>> classic puzzle. The language was LISP. 40 line of code in 42 hours on
>> a VAX.
>
> A little common sense and no lines of code I did it in a few minutes. 
> It's
> interesting that I would have thought it impossible if someone had asked 
> me
> before having thought about the problem.
>
> My first reaction was to put the first queen in a corner since it would
> cover the least squares, but that led to problems.  After realizing not to
> put a queen in a corner and to try to space them knight moves apart a 
> answer
> fell out pretty quickly (third attempt overall, including the queen in the
> corner).
>
>
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