English

Hyper-bishops, Hyper-rooks, and Hyper-queens: Percentage of Safe Squares on Higher Dimensional Chess Boards

Combinatorics 2025-12-09 v4 Probability

Abstract

The nn queens problem considers the maximum number of safe squares on an n×nn \times n chess board when placing nn queens; the answer is only known for small nn. Miller, Sheng and Turek considered instead nn randomly placed rooks, proving the proportion of safe squares converges to 1/e21/e^2. We generalize and solve when randomly placing nn hyper-rooks and nk1n^{k-1} line-rooks on a kk-dimensional board, using combinatorial and probabilistic methods, with the proportion of safe squares converging to 1/ek1/e^k. We prove that the proportion of safe squares on an n×nn \times n board with bishops in 2 dimensions converges to 2/e22/e^2. This problem is significantly more interesting and difficult; while a rook attacks the same number of squares wherever it's placed, this is not so for bishops. We expand to the kk-dimensional chessboard, defining line-bishops to attack along 22-dimensional diagonals and hyper-bishops to attack in the k1k-1 dimensional subspace defined by its diagonals in the k2k-2 dimensional subspace. We then combine the movement of rooks and bishops to consider the movement of queens in 2 dimensions, as well as line-queens and hyper-queens in kk dimensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.04423,
  title  = {Hyper-bishops, Hyper-rooks, and Hyper-queens: Percentage of Safe Squares on Higher Dimensional Chess Boards},
  author = {Caroline Cashman and Joseph Cooper and Raul Marquez and Steven J. Miller and Jenna Shuffelton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04423},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

19 pages, 6 figures