Subject: 8 Queens on a Chess Board

Name: Patrick McGarrity
Who is asking: Other
Level: All

Question:
In the classic puzzle where you put 8 Queens on a chess board and no queen can take any other queen, I was wondering if there was multiple solutions. Obviously there's the mirror and opposite images of the way I solved it, but I was wondering how many solutions there were, and if these solutions all followed a similar pattern?

The problem is quite deep, there are 40 articles reviewed in Math Reviews that contain the words queens and chessboard.

The paper Campbell, Paul J. Gauss and the eight queens problem: a study in miniature of the propagation of historical error. (English. French summary) Historia Math. 4 (1977), no. 4, 397--404. discusses the role of Gauss in the solution of the problem.

The paper Gibbons, P. B.; Webb, J. A. Some new results for the queens domination problem. (English. English summary) Australas. J. Combin. 15 (1997), 145--160. Presents computing techniques that allow to compute the numbers of non-isomorphic ways of covering a chessboard of size n with k independent queens n between 1 and 15, and k between 1 and 8.