The Eternity Puzzle
Created | Updated Aug 13, 2007
In June 1999 the Eternity Puzzle was released to great buzz and exitement. Quickly capturing the imagination of many people, it accounted for 20% of the British gaming market within a month of being released. So what's all the fuss about?
1. There are 209 jigsaw pieces with between seven and eleven sides.
2 There is no pattern or picture to follow and all of the pieces are all the same colour green
3. Either side of the pieces can be used
4. The number of combinations in which the pieces can be placed is a figure 621 numbers long.
5. The first person to complete it won a £1,000,000 prize.
The creator
The game was created by the Hon. Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher. It took him fourteen years to create and he predicted that it would take four years to be solved. Mr Monkton said that he thought that a computer alone could not solve the problem but that it could be solved using a computer and human ingenuity.
The Prize
The million pound prize was to be paid by 2 parties; half by the creator and half by Lloyds Insurance. When the prize was eventually won, 2 years earlier than expected, it was thought that Mr Monckton has not yet made enough money from the game to pay his half of the prize. It was reported that Mr Monckton had to sell his £1.5m mansion in Aberdeenshire to pay for the prize.
The Winners
Alex Selby, 32, from Cambridge was given the puzzle in 1999 and proceeded to try and solve it with the aid of Oliver Riordan, a former colleague. The two designed a probability model and first looked at the larger pieces; it took two weeks to decide on the most probable combinations. After this, they refined the programme and eventually solved it within the next 16 months.Worldwide appeal
The game proved incredibly popular in South Africa, Australia and even Turkey but mysteriously it wasn't released in the United States; publishers weren't apparently interested in it. Despite this, 250,000 puzzles were sold within a year of release. There were many websites and communities set up during the time the game was unsolved. They were often dedicated to working together to find a solution: what would have happened to the prize money if a community had have solved it is up for debate.
The future
Mr Monckton is working on a follow up puzzle, imaginatively called Eternity 2, which has more pieces and will have a much larger prize; he is expecting this puzzle to be available in the United States. There is currently no expected release date.
Official Site
