I've been looking at the Eternity II puzzle. It's interesting from a programming point of view. I have a couple of ideas that might make it possible to find a solution (before the sun burns out), but unless I spend some more time investigating, I won't know. More investigating requires buying a copy of the puzzle (for $130!), as it seems no one has had the nerve to post what all the pieces look like. And then I'm afraid that after I investigated I would realize that all my ideas are for nought and it will still take from now until forever before anyone finds a solution. So why bother? Well, it might be a good application for CUDA, or a test of a quantum computer.
At least one enterprising soul is promoting a distributed solution, à la Protein Folding or SETI. Sign your computer up to work on the puzzle and if it happens to find the answer, the program's creator will split the prize with you.
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I read a few descriptions about this puzzle and apparently each of the 256 pieces are numbered on the back. I assume these have been 'randomly numbered' which may represent an easy solution to the puzzle namely computers don't do random very well, standard procedure for randomness is to use the clock cycle as a 'seed' I'm not a cryptographer but I would be willing to bet there is a pattern in the resulting numbers generated.
I was looking at random numbers a while back and I remember coming across a 3-D plot that illustrated just what you are talking about. Initially this plot just looked like a cloud of black dots, but you could turn this cloud to look at it from different directions, and if you turned it just right, all the dots lined up into straight lines.
The pieces of Eternity II are strictly ordered by the patterns on them.
From this I concluded which numbers were probably assigned to the patterns. It makes perfectly sense, but does not help you in solving the puzzle.
So forget about this approach.
Still about 2 month left for finding a solution :-)
Since I originally posted this I have tried writing a couple of programs to solve the puzzle, but they just run and run and run ... for days and weeks without making any significant progress.
I've got a new scheme, but I haven't made much progress on programming it.
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