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.

Gordian’s Knot has been named Best Puzzle of the Year by Games magazine.  The puzzle consists of 6 interlocking pieces that must be taken apart.  The final solution is said to require 69-moves.  The press release from ThinkFun also notes that the puzzle recently appeared on the TV show Numb3rs.

This post marks a return of original puzzles to puzzlinks.com.  A new Lost Bridges puzzle.  I’ve updated the puzzle so that symbols are no longer used.  The number of bridges connected to each island is indicated by the shape and orientation of the island.  This allows the solver to fill in the number corresponding to a particular shape and orientation.  So that a new Lost Bridges puzzle looks something like this:

And a correct solution looks like this.

As always, I have a pdf version of the puzzle.

I’m planning to bring back more original puzzles in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out.

This has popped up a number of places, most notably Joystiq.  A recent Fox Trot comic strip featured a Sudoku puzzle where the numbers were replaced by equations.  It’s pretty funny.  On Joystiq, they’ve solved all of the equations and turned it into a normal Sudoku.  If you want to be hard core about solving it, you might want to check out the strip first.

WPC 2006 is over and the individual winner is Ulrich Voigt of Germany who won for the second straight year and for the fifth time over all.  The competition is only in its 15th year, which means Ulrich Voigt has won one third or all World Puzzle Championships.

Team USA took the team championship, it’s ninth.  Three of the four team USA members finished in the top 5 for individual rankings.

There’s plenty of good info about the event at the WPC 2006 site and the Team USA site.