A recent press release has announced the coming of Eternity II, the follow up to the popular Eternity Puzzle. The puzzle will be available starting July 28 (there’s a big clock counting down on the site) and there will be a $2 Million prize for whomever solves it.
The original Eternity Puzzle was created by Christopher Monckton and was released in June of 1999 and it consisted of 209 irregular pieces to be fit into a dodecagon. The puzzle was solved less than a year later by Alex Selby and Oliver Riordan who won a prize of £1 million. (There’s a great description of the solution on mathpuzzle.com.) Apparently, the puzzle took far less time to solve than Monckton had anticipated and he nearly had to sell his mansion. But, apparently, he was protected by prize-indemnity insurance. Who knew such a thing existed? I’m not sure why he needed the money anyway. Wikipedia reports that 500,000 copies were sold for £35 each. I obviously don’t know what their margin was, but it seems like they should have had the £1 million.
The new puzzle is also designed by Monckton but appears to be very different from the original. All of the pieces are regular squares with colored patterns on them. The goal seems to be to arrange all of the pieces edge to edge so that the colors match. There’s a good picture of this here.
Monckton may be taking another gamble with this one. Let’s hope his insurance company doesn’t have to pay out again.
Tags: eternity,monckton,puzzles
Actually, it has been revealed since that he was selling his house anyway. He just said it was to pay the million so as to make some free advertising on the puzzle. He did win quite a bit of money.
And I guess he plans to do it again… Good for him!
Comment by Ratfox — March 1, 2007 @ 9:15 am
Yep I can confirm he was planning on selling anyway and used it as free publicity !
Hope he made a mistake and the next one can be solved aswelll lol …
Comment by Herbert — July 11, 2007 @ 7:04 am
INFINITY2 FREE DEMO VERSION
Find the Eternity`s solution!!!
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http://rapidshare.com/files/58807680/setupInfinity2-Demo.exe
WEB PAGE
http://www.infinity2game.blogspot.com
Comment by El_Pillim — September 28, 2007 @ 12:37 pm