Courtesy of reader "Aurelio", here is a chance for those of you who work as programmers to make a cool one...million...dollars (cue Dr. Evil bringing his pinky to his lips). Some of you are probably familiar with the "eight queens" problem, where the task is to arrange eight queens on an open chess board in such a way that no queen is on the same file, rank, or diagonal as any other queen.
It's pretty easy to solve it by intelligent trial-and-error means, but what about a 1000 x 1000 version? Apparently, this is a very laborious process even for a computer, at least given the programming techniques tried so far. If you can find an algorithm that produces a speedy solution, a nice chunk of change can be yours!