A Quilt.
My mom made me a quilt.
She’s not entirely proud of it as she claims that the quilting itself is not as majestic as she’d like it to be. But I helped her a bit with the design and I think it turned out awesome.
The quilt is made up of 100 small squares. Each side is 10 squares long and there is a thing black border that ostracizes the outer row of squares. A royal pink and white pattern divides up the background and then 8 black squares are placed in a seemingly random patter across the quilt.
However, there is nothing random about the placement of these black squares. In fact, the placements are quite specific.
Can you figure it out? And can you guess the name of the quilt?
(if I’ve already told you… please refrain from this mini fun contest)
It’s the chessboard problem, all the 8 squares are in different rows and columns.
Tell your Mom the quilt is awesome. I want to try making some quilt blocks with round pieces, but I’m afraid to try.
Yes! Well done! You’re the first person to figure it out, even amongst confidants earlier in the quilt’s life. (did you notice the two adjective hints? ‘majesty’ and ‘royal’?)
The problem is such:
On an 8×8 chessboard place 8 queens so that no queen has the opportunity to strike another queen. For those chess-illiterate, Queens can move as far as they want on the vertical, horizontal, and diagonal.
So, if you look at the quilt you’ll notice that no two black squares share the same horizontal, vertical, or diagonal.
Why do I love this so much?
Well, my mom makes a lot of quilts. And every time I look at them I find little subtle patterns by connecting squares. This bothers the heck out of me.
The Queen’s Quilt escapes this problem by not allowing my eyes to connect the dots. Instead, I can just look at the quilt in happy relaxed enjoyment.
Did she quilt the solution (in Ruby) on the back?
Actually, I think we’re going to accomplish this via silk screen instead of quilting.
Damn, and I was trying to think of some maths sequence that fitted 12, 27, 34…
this is awesome.
This sounds like something out of XKCD!