Queen Problem Solution and Analysis

This repository contains the solutions to the Queen problem in multiple languages, and compares their execution runtimes. Contributions to improve these solutions or provide solutions in other languages are welcome.

Table of Contents

• Motivation and Background
• Solution Structure
• Working Plan
• Live Results

Motivation and Background

I have not (yet?) formally studied Computer Science. I gained knowledge, skills, and experience through self-learning during my professional career. I discovered the Queen problem about 15 years ago. However, for several years, I struggled to understand the backtracking mentioned in the solutions.

That changed one fateful day in 2018 when I found Abdul Bari's YouTube video 6.1 N Queens Problem using Backtracking. His clear explanation helped me easily grasp the "backtracking" solution, and I quickly prototyped it in C++. [side-note: I used the online compiler ideone at the time to compile my solution. Interestingly, it ran successfully back then. However, when I accidentally submitted it again recently without any code changes, it failed to compile due to the constexpr in the template parameter!]

I did not revisit the problem until mid-2024. In the interim, I gained more experience with Python. I also self-learned CI/CD pipelines: Github Actions and Gitlab CI/CD. A few weeks ago, I also started learning Rust. Putting together all these skills seemed like a fun project, and that's how this project began.

Solution Structure

• Solutions are developed on the develop/queen branch, with a separate directory for each language.
• Github Actions workflows are developed directly on the main branch for now. This will change when this project has other contributors.
• Artifacts from the solution runs are stored on the artifacts branch in the artifacts directory.
• Conventional commits and squashed commits are used for a clean commit history.
• Tagging the solution versions and running the pipeline jobs is done manually for now.

Working Plan

• Step 1: Move my 2018 C++ prototype here, fix bugs, reworked the solution to accept N as a command-line input, and write code documentation. ✅
• Step 2: Translate the solution into Python and Rust. For uniformity of comparison, use the same algorithm, with language-specific adaptations as needed. ✅
• Step 3: Develop the scripts to run and plot the solutions. This includes the pipeline build script and a script to run locally for convenience. ✅
• Step 4: Share the first version of solutions and results publicly. ✅
• Step 5: To be revealed shortly!
• Step 6: Optimize the solutions and the build scripts.
• ...
• Step N: To be decided.

Live Results

Plot of average execution time (log scale)

Plot of average execution time (linear scale)