Back in grad school, I took a configurable computing course where we were to solve the N-Queens problem on an FPGA. My short write-ups are here: http://people.c

Back in grad school, I took a configurable computing course where we were to solve the N-Queens problem on an FPGA. My short write-ups are here: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/ece5530/ http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/ece5530/ This was a computer engineering course, and I was a computer science student with no background in Verilog or VHDL. I think it took me about 30 hours to get a working solution. However, my solution is very limited, and shows how unfamiliar I was with thinking in hardware terms; other students in the course produced solutions which did not have my limitations, and they did it with much less effort. When I mentioned that to another student in the course, he looked surprised. When I mentioned I was a CS student with no prior experience with FPGAs, Verilog or VHDL, he said, oh, that's pretty good!