8 Queens reference

8 Queens reference

[Ehud Lamm]

Browsing dejanews I saw discussion of this problem, but didn't see the
reference I like the most. The discussion is mixed with the "kindness"
thread, so there are way to messages to check. So in case no one mentioned
it, and people are still interested - I'd recommend Wirth article which is
ONLINE.

To quote from the suggested reading page of my site (which is of course
highly recommended):

Program Development by Stepwise Refinement - N. Wirth
       Wirth (the creator of Pascal) describes what we would now call
       "top-down" development. He goes through an example program - for
       solving the 8-Queens puzzle, and shows how to break the code down
       into manageable pieces.

see http://www.acm.org/classics/dec95/

Ehud Lamm     mslamm@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ehudlamm  <== My home on the web

Re: 8 Queens reference

[Robert Dewar]

In article
<Pine.A41.3.96-heb-2.07.990907175903.39650A-100000@pluto.mscc.hu
ji.ac.il>,
  Ehud Lamm <mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> Program Development by Stepwise Refinement - N. Wirth
>        Wirth (the creator of Pascal) describes what we would
now call
>        "top-down" development. He goes through an example
program - for
>        solving the 8-Queens puzzle, and shows how to break the
code down
>        into manageable pieces.


That's not quite right. The terms top-down development and
stepwise refinement are both current, stepwise refinement
is a particular approach that is in the general top down
category, i.e. a stepwise refinement approach is an example
of top down approaches, but not all top down approaches would
be considered to be stepwise refinement.


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Re: 8 Queens reference

[Ehud Lamm]

On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, Robert Dewar wrote:

|That's not quite right. The terms top-down development and
|stepwise refinement are both current, stepwise refinement
|is a particular approach that is in the general top down
|category, i.e. a stepwise refinement approach is an example
|of top down approaches, but not all top down approaches would
|be considered to be stepwise refinement.
|

After posting I asked myself, any chance Robert Dewar will miss the chance
to correct these terms?
I guess you are as attentive as ever. 

For the pueposes I use the paper, it can be used to show the top-down way
of thinking. But fo course in general your objection is valid.

Ehud Lamm     mslamm@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ehudlamm  <== My home on the web
 

Re: 8 Queens reference

[Geoff Bull]

Ehud Lamm wrote:
> 
> Browsing dejanews I saw discussion of this problem, but didn't see the
> reference I like the most. 
> 
> see http://www.acm.org/classics/dec95/
> 
Of course simply searching the web for "eight queens"
using your favourite search engine  will throw up a few useful
references (as well as many that are not useful):
e.g.
http://www.wi.leidenuniv.nl/home/kosters/nqueens.bib
http://www.dsu.edu/~rolfe/SCCS-95/index.html

There is also a fairly new search engine people mightn't
know about:
http://www.cora.justresearch.com
"Cora is a special-purpose search engine covering computer science
research papers. It allows keyword searches over the partial text of
Postscript-formatted papers it has found by spidering the Web. 
"

Re: 8 Queens reference

[John Duncan]

An interesting instance of an 8-Queens solution is a demo for MLj, a version
of ML that outputs Java bytecodes. Check out:

http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/mlj/demos/queens/index.html

(It's very pretty.)
-John