Reply To: Maths
Part puzzle, part maths question. If we start with a simple puzzle…
Can you place eight coins on an eight by eight grid, such as a chess board, such that no two coins share a common row, nor a common column, nor a common diagonal? I’m sure you can, if you give it a go.
If we wanted to find all solutions to the puzzle, and group them if they were linked by symmetry, thereby identifying the unique solutions, that would need a bit more work, possibly using a hash function. A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values and is used to aid sorting and searching data.
If I wanted to write a hash function, which would return the same value for any solution to the the above puzzle that were rotations and reflections of each other, but was also guaranteed to return a different hash value for solutions which did not share any symmetry, how would I go about that?
Thanks for this, it is a really intriguing puzzle related to real world questions about privacy preserving data analysis. I have deleted the comments you made below as you requested, but if you repost them in a series to prompt further discussion I would be happy to schedule the release. Harry