Ant n-Queen solver

Swarm intelligence and evolutionary techniques are heavily used by the researchers to solve combinatorial and NP hard problems. The n-Queen problem is a combinatorial problem which become intractable for large values of 'n' and thus placed in NP (Non-Deterministic Polynomial) class problem. In this paper, a solution is proposed for n-Queen problem based on ACO (Ant Colony Optimization). The n-Queen problem is basically a generalized form of 8-Queen problem. In 8-Queen problem, the goal is to place eight queens such that no queen can kill the other using standard chess queen moves. The environment for the ants is a directed graph which we call search space is constructed for efficiently searching the valid placement of n-queens such that they do not harm each other. We also develop an intelligent heuristic function that helps in finding the solution very quickly and effectively. The paper contains the detail discussion of problem background, problem complexity, Ant Colony Optimization (Swarm Intelligence), proposed echnique design and architecture and a fair amount of experimental results.