COMMENT

Computer programmers are being urged to enter a competition to solve a “deceptively simple” but unsolved chess puzzle and win $1 million offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the US.

Researchers at the University of St Andrews also said a program capable of solving the “Queens Puzzle” would be so powerful it could solve tasks currently considered impossible such as decrypting and breaching the toughest internet security.

In a paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Professor Ian Gent and his team conclude that the financial rewards for whoever devised the program would be immense, with firms rushing to buy it to use as an IT weapon.

Devised in 1850, the Queens Puzzle originally challenged a player to place eight queens on a standard chessboard so that no two queens could attack each other.

This means putting one queen in each row, so that no two queens are in the same column, and no two queens in the same diagonal.

Although the problem has

“If you could write a computer program that could solve the problem really fast, you could adapt it to solve many important daily problems”

PROFESSOR IAN GENT