A very nifty (if somewhat detailed) complexity analysis of the Algorithm X appeared in blogosphere's festschrift for Knuth's 70, http://11011110.livejournal.com/128249.html
I've used P159 in my absolutely first assignment in the intro programming class. I was to make a N-queens solver. The assignment obviously asked for a 8-line backtracking program. But I was naïve. I went to the library and turned it inside out. My solution was ca. 500 lines, and also implemented a way to find the number of solutions without computing them (this was from IIRC a paper by Rivin), and had a randomized mode which would find just a single solution but for fast for very large N (this I found in Norvig's AIMA in a footnote referencing a paper by J.M., I don't remember the page or the full name)). Good times.
A very nifty (if somewhat detailed) complexity analysis of the Algorithm X appeared in blogosphere's festschrift for Knuth's 70, http://11011110.livejournal.com/128249.html
I've used P159 in my absolutely first assignment in the intro programming class. I was to make a N-queens solver. The assignment obviously asked for a 8-line backtracking program. But I was naïve. I went to the library and turned it inside out. My solution was ca. 500 lines, and also implemented a way to find the number of solutions without computing them (this was from IIRC a paper by Rivin), and had a randomized mode which would find just a single solution but for fast for very large N (this I found in Norvig's AIMA in a footnote referencing a paper by J.M., I don't remember the page or the full name)). Good times.