Queen Attack

Instructions

Given the position of two queens on a chess board, indicate whether or not they are positioned so that they can attack each other.

In the game of chess, a queen can attack pieces which are on the same row, column, or diagonal.

A chessboard can be represented by an 8 by 8 array.

So if you are told the white queen is at c5 (zero-indexed at column 2, row 3) and the black queen at f2 (zero-indexed at column 5, row 6), then you know that the set-up is like so:

  a b c d e f g h
8 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 8
7 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 7
6 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 6
5 _ _ W _ _ _ _ _ 5
4 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 4
3 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 3
2 _ _ _ _ _ B _ _ 2
1 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1
  a b c d e f g h

You are also able to answer whether the queens can attack each other. In this case, that answer would be yes, they can, because both pieces share a diagonal.

To complete this exercise, you need to implement the following functions:

• boardString
• canAttack

You will find the type signatures already in place, but it is up to you to define the functions.

Positions are specified as two-tuples:

• The first element is the row (rank in Chess terms).
• The second element is is the column (file in Chess terms).
• (0, 0) is the top left of the board, (0, 7) is the upper right,
• (7, 0) is the bottom left, and (7, 7) is the bottom right.

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Source

J Dalbey's Programming Practice problems