Solve the puzzle of Eternity!!

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

http://uk.eternityii.com/

It’s hard but has a prize of $2M if you can solve it.

There are 256! * 4^256 possible combinations, which is about 1e+661. Of course the fact that there are corner pieces and a centre piece reduces it a little bit.

When you consider the corners and the outer border cannot rotate, you get ((4! * 56!) * ((1414)! * 4^(1414))) == ((4! * 56!) * (196! * 4^196)) == ((1.7e+76) * ( 5.1e+483)) == 8.7e+559; which is not much different from the first figure :frowning:

Now everyone is talking about genetic algorithms. Although I am considering an attempt using that I think you need a much smarter type of GA. The reason being is that GA’s are good for finding “good” solutions but not necessarily the best solution. There are estimated to be between 10^72 and 10^87 particles in the universe! Also consider that evolution has not yet created the perfect being.

The problem also appears to be NP complete!

#2

The problem is only NP-complete if you compete by their rules =)

Given that the competition creators already have the solution, it’d be much much less effort to infiltrate them to steal the solution ;D

#3

lol, well I’ll go get my suit on :slight_smile:

#4

[quote=“Abuse,post:2,topic:30503”]
Yes, but is THAT really a P problem? Keep in mind you probably want to find the closest way to their office, you’ll want to fill your backpack up exactly to the limit, and on the way home, you might want to… uh… color some graphs!