The eight queens puzzle is the problem of placing eight chess queens on an 8×8 chessboard so that none of them can capture any other using the standard chess queen’s moves. The queens must be placed in such a way that no two queens attack each other. Thus, a solution requires that no two queens share the same row, column, or diagonal.

The puzzle was originally proposed in 1848 by the chess player Max Bezzel, and over the years, many mathematicians, including Gauss, have worked on this puzzle and its generalized n-queens problem.

I had to create a C++ version of this program and I thought it should be fun to make a web version of the puzzle, so I made it with jQuery and CSS. You can play it clicking in the next link: eight queens puzzle.

The game’s code is open through Creative Commons By-SA (like the rest of this blog), and the queen image is from Wikimedia Commons (under GFDL). Enjoy it!