Solving N-Queens Problem… How far can we go?

Question

The N-Queens Problem:

This problem states that given a chess board of size N by N, find the different permutations in which N queens can be placed on the board with

Answer 1

a short solution presented by raymond hettinger at pycon: easy ai in python

#!/usr/bin/env python
from itertools import permutations
n = 12
cols = range(n)
for vec in permutations(cols):
    if (n == len(set(vec[i] + i for i in cols))
          == len(set(vec[i] - i for i in cols))):
        print vec

computing all permutations is not scalable, though (O(n!))