Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The classic textbook example of the use of backtracking is the eight queens puzzle, that asks for all arrangements of eight chess queens on a standard chessboard so that no queen attacks any other. In the common backtracking approach, the partial candidates are arrangements of k queens in the first k rows of the board, all in different rows and ...
There are 92 solutions. The problem was first posed in the mid-19th century. In the modern era, it is often used as an example problem for various computer programming techniques. The eight queens puzzle is a special case of the more general n queens problem of placing n non-attacking queens on an n×n chessboard.
Algorithm X is a recursive, nondeterministic, depth-first, backtracking algorithm that finds all solutions to the exact cover problem. Some of the better-known exact cover problems include tiling, the n queens problem, and Sudoku. The name dancing links, which was suggested by Donald Knuth, stems from the way the
The book begins with a "tutorial" introducing classical algorithm design techniques including backtracking, divide-and-conquer algorithms, and dynamic programming, methods for the analysis of algorithms, and their application in example puzzles.
One way to speed up a brute-force algorithm is to reduce the search space, that is, the set of candidate solutions, by using heuristics specific to the problem class. For example, in the eight queens problem the challenge is to place eight queens on a standard chessboard so that no queen attacks any other.
The algorithm searches each potential move for the number of conflicts (number of attacking queens), shown in each square. The algorithm moves the queen to the square with the minimum number of conflicts, breaking ties randomly. Note that the number of conflicts is generated by each new direction that a queen can attack from. If two queens ...
The DPLL algorithm enhances over the backtracking algorithm by the eager use of the following rules at each step: Unit propagation If a clause is a unit clause, i.e. it contains only a single unassigned literal, this clause can only be satisfied by assigning the necessary value to make this literal true. Thus, no choice is necessary.
In a general constraint satisfaction problem, every variable can take a value in a domain. A backtracking algorithm therefore iteratively chooses a variable and tests each of its possible values; for each value the algorithm is recursively run. Look ahead is used to check the effects of choosing a given variable to evaluate or to decide the ...