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Eternity II Puzzle Anybody?
Posted by urikalish • 4/07/08 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Anybody here working on the Eternity II puzzle?
In case you don't know, the prize for the first person submitting a correct solution is 2 million dollars!
User Comments
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I barely have time to blow my nose at this point. But that looks pretty interesting.
Was there an eternity one-
yep, released in the UK several years back. took a college student 18 months to solve.
EDIT: well, he solved it 18 months after it was released - dunno how long it took him. -
I wonder the amount of hours he had to dedicate to do that
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and yes I automatically assumed that it was a man that solved it... I should have used they... my bad
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sounds cool - us.eternityii.com/
but i'm sure i would never come close to being the first one to complete it ... and i think i'd wind up losing interest and hurling the thing across the room when either the cats or the dogs walked across it. -
I think going at it manual would be futile.
I believe the only possible way to solve this puzzle is by using a computer.-
kind of looks that way to me, too. but i don't know how complex the first one was.
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My wife loves puzzles..."Hey honey, come here, what are you doing for the next 18 months, have any plans?"
Help Hal 9000
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000
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Oh, that is cool...just went and did a sample puzzle. I could definately get addicted to that!-
Did you finish it?
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I finished the online puzzle (4x4) in 2.5 minutes.
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There is a 1-piece-wide gray frame, so the frame consists of 60 pieces so that's 60! possibilities.
The rest of the board consists of 196 pieces which results in 196! possibilities.
Every piece can be set in four directions so that's another 4^256 possibilities.
Since there are four ways to place the completed puzzle on the board, we can divide the result by 4.
So I think the total number of possibilities is 60! x 196! x 4^255
Anybody cares to check my calculation?-
That's about 10^600, when the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe is 10^80.
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Don't psych yourself out Uri
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Hmmm... the edges and corners need more handling... OK, I think it's:
4! x 56! x 196! x 4^195 = 2.186*10^559
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Very cool puzzle. I have a thing for patterns so of course I did the trial puzzle!
I may just have to buy this thing and do it
I don't know how my time worked out though - 2 mins, 30 seconds, once I got the hang of how to do it. (use the pieces and all that).-
I may just have to write the program that solves this puzzle.
Probably will be ready for Eternity III. -
Use the computer in your brain
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I will consult with the REAL smart guys at work...
p.s. Even if the algorithm will be amazingly good, it's gonna take some brute force to check as many arrangements as possible. Care to donate your idle CPU time? -
I honestly think that sometimes it's just a matter of pattern recognition...it's that kind of thing where some people just look at it and get it, they "see" it.
I'm seriously considering going to toys r us and buying the game. (I would go to Borders but they are MUCH more expensive )Because I really, honestly love that crap. I'm almost Autistic when it comes to stuff like that.
Then again....I may not be on BC for a while if I do, as my obsession will consume me LOL! -
Anok, you are NOT going to beat (1 / 10^600) without a computer!
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Of course you can. Not as quickly - but it can still be done.
After all, it is our brains that create the computers and the algorithms used to solve the problems -
Anok, I hope you are just messing with me, but just in case you're not... I don't wanna be held responsible for the destruction of your social life in the next few months. You must understand - YOU CAN NOT BEAT (1 / 10^600) WITHOUT POWERFUL COMPUTERS, AN EXTREMELY SMART ALGORITHM, MONTHS OR MAYBE EVEN YEARS, AND A GREAT DEAL OF LUCK!!!
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Hehehe....I'm not messing with you - but I'm also not crazy. I wouldn't really let it mess with my (non existent) social life - that's what BC is for
But sure you can - the human brain is capable of amazing things. Like I said, it would just take a lot longer. Don't you remember the chess player who utterly destroyed the computer he played against, in record time to boot? (Of course I can't remember his name...)
Out of curiosity, was there a contest for the original version? If so, who won it, and did they use a computer to solve it?
Would using a computer be cheating, in all seriousness? -
Why do you think this puzzle is called "Eternity"...?
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About the first Eternity puzzle from you-know-where...
"The puzzle was solved on May 15, 2000, before the first deadline by two Cambridge mathematicians, Alex Selby and Oliver Riordan, who had used an ingenious technique to vastly accelerate their solution. They realized that it was trivial to fill the board almost completely, to an "end-game position" where an irregularly-shaped void had to be filled with only a few pieces, at which point the pieces left would be the "wrong shapes" to fill the remaining space. The hope of solving the end-game depended vitally on having pieces that were easy to tile together in a variety of shapes.
They started a computer search to find which pieces tiled well or badly, and then used this data to alter their otherwise-standard backtracking search program to use the bad pieces first, in the hope of being left with only good pieces in the hard final part of the search. This heuristic approach paid off rapidly, with a complete solution being obtained within seven months of brute-force search on two domestic PCs. The puzzle's inventor said that the prize payout had forced him to sell his home; however, in 2006 this was revealed to be a publicity story." -
They DID use computers! Hmmm.
I'm still gonna try though
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OK, see you in a few decades...
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Possibly! hehehe.
What do I get if I do it without a computer? -
The equivalent of 2 million dollars in the year 17,549 AD.
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LMAO...smart and funny....
Or would that just make you a smart ass? -
No, a smart a*s would write
"The equivalent of 2 million dollars in the year XVIIDXLIX Anno Domini."
Note - There should be an overline above the 'XVII' part, but BC blocks span tags. -
yup, you've got it in you
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Good Luck! -
$2,000,000, huh? Odds seem to be about 2,000,000 to 1.-
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Odds seem to be about 2.186*10^559 to 1.
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OK, so as you probably understand that there is no way to solve this puzzle completely and get those 2 million US dollars, even with a super-computer, but about a week ago I heard they offer a smaller prize to people who get close. So naturally, being a smart a*s, I went and bought this puzzle.
First, I saw that there is already one known fixed tile, so the correct number of possibilities is 1 x 4! x 56! x 195! x 4^195 = ~10^557, still a huge number, much larger than the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe.
I don’t believe anyone will solve this thing, but I just wanted to see how close a simple brute-force algorithm can get me. So, I wrote a simple program and ran it on my PC last night. After a few hours of running, and a few millions checked arrangements, the best score produced by this program was 236 out of the 256 tiles (92.2%). May seem like much, but it isn’t.
Still running, so stay tuned… -
My program's logo:
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