History & community
The record and the people behind it: two decades of Eternity II told as a story, the record boards themselves, the record-holders and theorists, the academic literature, and how to add your own work to the wiki.
The Eternity II story at a glance, from the mailing list founded in 2000 to the 470 record that still stands. A scannable timeline of the turning points, each linking into the full two-part history and the message where it happened.
The community's story, from a mailing list founded seven years before the puzzle existed to the $10,000 scrutiny prize won under a borrowed name, with every event sourced to its original message. Part I of a growing chronicle.
Seventeen years after the prize: the contest dies with its solution locked in a safe, 467 stands for a decade, the archive survives Yahoo's shutdown by days, and then an outsider from Reddit rewrites the record book. Every event sourced to its original message.
Eternity II has never been solved, but fifteen years of community effort have pushed the best board to 470/480. Who holds what, how they did it, and why some headline "480" boards are not actually the real puzzle.
The famous Eternity II boards, treated as first-class citizens: Verhaard's prize-winning 467, the Blackwood record line to 470, the strict five-clue record to 464, and this project's own boards: who found each one, when, and what makes it structurally interesting. Every bundled board opens in the viewer.
Two decades of Eternity II research were done by named people on a mailing list. This page is the gallery: who they are, what each of them contributed, and where to read it in their own words. A thank-you as much as an index.
The academic literature on Eternity II and edge-matching puzzles, drawn from the project's research notes and the community reading list, and ranked by how useful each paper actually is if your goal is to write a solver.
This wiki is the community's research home, and there is room in it for your work. Three ways to get it published, from a mailing-list post to a pull request, plus the small set of house rules that keep every page trustworthy.