Eternity II Update

I finally have made some headway on the Eternity II problem. I have all of the pieces faithfully encoded and safely stored. It takes a long time to encode those pieces (about 6 hours with double checking). I have also done my first visualization of the problem!

Below is each piece of the eternity 2 puzzle. It is connected by a colored line to each piece it could possibly be connected to. The color of the line is representative of the 23 patters found on the edges of the physical puzzle. The idea I am investigating is if you remove all but 1 line of each edge color from each piece, will you have a solution to the puzzle? Good question. I will let you know what I come up with!

In other news, I have been making slow progress on the Wedding Feast but this weekend is looking like a  puzzle marathon! M is off work tomorrow and she is really getting close on the Summer Porch!

Talk to you soon!

-Thomas

Eternity II Visualized

Algorithm Design and Analysis

Courses I am taking or soon taking. Not puzzles but
similarly very challenging!

I am taking a 5 day diversion from puzzling so I can complete my coursework in Algorithms. Not sure if you have noticed, but I AM trying to solve the Eternity 2 puzzle. Its a 256 pieces puzzle and if you can put it together you get a million bucks! Pretty cool right! Well, this requires a lot of mathematics and to solve.


I have always been a programer versus a computer scientist, I am trying to bridge that Gap with Coursera! You can take courses from free from the brightest institutions in the world. Currently my course is being taught buy a professor at Stanford. I love it! Check them out and expand your brain too!

The Eternity II Puzzle: A simple 256 piece puzzle? Easy.... um no, if you can solve it, you will win a million dollars! Bring your math skills! You can view more info here: Eternity 2

Eternity II Puzzle

The Eternity II Puzzle

So we received the puzzle that to-date, no one has been able to solve. For those of you not familiar with the puzzle, it a 256 piece puzzle with 23 different patterns on the pieces. The goal of the puzzle is to assemble the puzzle so that all of the edges align with they gray pattern on the edges. Oh yeah, when this came out on 2007, the first person to solve it my Dec 30th 2010 would be awarded 2 million dollars. The date has come and gone, and no one solved it. If you think it would be a simple issue of getting a bunch of computers together to try each possible placement, it wont happen. The number of possibilities is  in the order of 10⁶⁰⁰.which is beyond the imagination of this author (a trillion dollars is 10¹² as an example.

Here is a small 4x4 example (The actual puzzle is 16x16)

4x4 Example of how the pieces go together correctly and a "solved" pattern.

So there are a lot of smart people out there working on this project. Here are a couple of links to work I find will be basing my work off of: