Eternity2.fr

Hi,

As Etienne correctly pointed out earlier, the official Eternity II rules state: "To protect other solvers, the judges will disqualify any entry whose existence becomes publicly known before the date of the annual scrutiny following its submission, and any entrant who has publicly disclosed any details of any of the Eternity II pieces in any form or medium."

Since we passed this mentioned scrutiny date, (and in fact do not even mention anything about an entry in this message) it should be perfectly safe to announce that the highest score reached on eternity2.fr by December 31, 2008, was 467. It was reached more than 30 times by many different people on the eternity2.fr site. This is a great achievement! Just a pity that the 468 was so hard.

My original expectations were that on average 60 467's were needed to find one 468, or once every 6x10^15 nodes, and was quite optimistic that a 468 would be found by one of you. The eternity2.fr community searched totally more than 10^16 nodes (which is fantastic!) with the 4.0 and 4.1 versions. So partly we were not too lucky, and partly I think my original theoretical estimates were too optimistic, probably due to the fact that 468 is so rare that the efficiency of the heuristic methods used in the solver is somewhat reduced.

I also wrote about the internals of the eii solver that is also incorporated in the eternity2.fr solver, see http://www.fingerboys.se/eii/eii_details.html .

Best regards,

Louis