The history of Eternity II is usually told through the people and the
solvers. This page tells it through the boards themselves: the handful of
artifacts that carry the whole record line, whoever found them. Each entry
says who announced the board and where, and what is publicly known about its
structure. Every board shown here is bundled with this site: click any
preview to load it in the viewer and re-score it edge by edge. The
full timeline and method history live on the
records page; this is the gallery.
The board that won the only money Eternity II ever paid out. Louis Verhaard's
distributed eii solver, released to
volunteers in September 2008 with the words "I am stuck"
(msg 5940), had found 467/480
more than 40 times by different users by the time he
documented it (msg 6275). At
the 31 December 2008 scrutiny the entry, submitted under the name of Anna
Karlsson of Lund (Verhaard's household), took the $10,000 best-partial prize
(msg 6337, with the group
recognizing the winner immediately at
msg 6349).
Two later footnotes change how the board reads. Re-reading Verhaard's own
account, Jef Bucas noted the 467 was achieved under a self-imposed handicap:
Verhaard had misinterpreted the rules and restricted the kind of board he
allowed himself to submit
(msg 10582). And by 2023 the
score had become a calibration target: "last week I found about 30 x 467. I
use this target to calibrate the code I'm running"
(msg 11001). It stood as the
record for twelve years anyway.
The viewer also bundles three sibling 467s (Verhaard 467a, 467b, 467c) from
the same campaign, in its board menu.
The first advance past 467 in twelve years arrived from outside the
community: a Reddit post by Joshua Blackwood, then unknown to the mailing
list, relayed at msg 10032. A
board with only 12 breaks, 468/480. Bucas verified it, added it to the
viewer, and passed on the startling claim that the author could "find a 468
every 4 days" (msg 10033).
Days later Blackwood open-sourced
the solver that found it
(msg 10037). Every board below
this point traces back to that code.
"Your solver is fantastic!! I ran it for a few days on about a couple of
hundred cores and hit the jackpot. New record score of 469! Only 11 breaks!"
So wrote Peter McGavin, running Blackwood's freshly published solver
(msg 10045). Blackwood
explained the solver's break discipline in the same thread: breaks are never
allowed to touch, so this 469 is equivalently a 249-piece partial with 7
holes (msg 10051).
Structurally this board has a signature you can check yourself: all eleven of
its unmatched edges sit in the top five rows, leaving an eleven-row slab that
is locally flawless: the damage is swept up against the edge the search
finished at. That geometry, and why it flips on boards built in the other
direction, is analyzed in
Where the mismatches live.
Bucas posted his first two 469s in October
(msg 10052, "Here are 2
other 469"), ported Blackwood's algorithm to C, roughly doubling its speed
(msg 10065), and the stream
kept coming: boards c through g in November, from
msg 10067 ("Another one yay
\o/") through msg 10078,
which shipped together with the open-sourced port, libblackwood. All seven
are in the viewer's board menu as Bucas 469a–g.
The odd one out is Carlos Fernandez's. He fed McGavin's 469 to a
piece-exchange program of his own and found another 469 differing by a
single piece (msg 10074),
proof, in Bucas's words when he added it to the viewer, that "even at 469,
there is still a little bit of flexibility left"
(msg 10075). That flexibility
is thin: it is exactly the kind of isolated tie the rigidity analysis below
predicts, not a path upward.
Blackwood closed his own arc with a nearly wordless message: a viewer URL, a
piece list (470/480, 10 breaks), and the single line "I haven't physically
put it together yet, but I found one!"
(msg 10117). He later
confirmed it was found with exactly the public repo's code
(msg 10161), the retuned
schedule he had published in advance, and then stopped: "I have not written
a line of code or run any algorithms since I found a 470"
(msg 10185).
The score has been tied once, not beaten. In December 2024 Bucas restarted "a
few threads of Joshua's code" and another 470 appeared
(msg 11401); Fernandez noticed
its three unmatched border figures allowed a rearrangement and posted a 470b
(msg 11403). The 470 class
remains a Blackwood-solver monopoly, and 470 remains the ceiling: "No one is
even close… The best result to date, is the partial solution from Joshua
Blackwood, 470/480 edges matching"
(msg 11343).
Three publicly documented facts hold across the 468/469/470 line.
Same clue regime. All of them place the mandatory starter piece at its
official spot and none of the four optional clue pieces at theirs. The
community checked this for the 470
(msg 10554), and Blackwood
confirmed he had the clue tiles and deliberately did not use them
(msg 10185). Under the
original contest rules only the starter was mandatory, so these boards were
prize-eligible as submitted.
Banded mismatches. The few unmatched edges are not scattered; they pack
into one band of rows against the edge the search finished at.
Where the mismatches live scores the real
boards live and shows the band; it also shows this project's boards
exhibiting the same band, mirrored.
Local rigidity. None of these boards is an almost-solution waiting for a
polish. The rigidity wall uses exact
integer-programming solves to prove that on record boards, freeing whole
regions and refilling them optimally returns the same arrangement: the best
boards sit at the bottom of their own valleys. Fernandez's single-piece-swap
469 is the exception that proves the rule: a tie next door, never a step up.
Most published record boards keep only the mandatory starter piece. In March
2023 a thread asked the stricter question: what is the best board that
respects all five official clues
(msg 11037)? A ladder climbed
in days: 412, then 452 and 457 (Carlos Fernandez), then 453/455/456/458
(David Barr), stopping at Bruno Gauthier's 460, "made with my own
program and Eternity II Editor"
(msg 11074); McGavin converted
it to the shared viewer format
(msg 11081).
That 460 stood for more than three years. In late June 2026 a new thread,
"Record of Eternity2 with 5 hints?", reopened the line: Benjamin Riotte
posted a 461, then a wave of results climbing to 464/480 (only 16 broken
edges), the first advance on the strict record since 2023
(groups.io msg 11919).
Igor Pejic reached the same 463–464 range independently in the same
thread, using what he described as a "modified Blackwood's DFS algorithm". All
of the boards respect the five clues at their official cells (starter #139,
hints #208, #255, #181, #249).
The strict line matters because of what the five clues imply: the community's
solution-count estimate with all five clues placed is about 0.00000004
(effectively a unique target), against roughly 14,702 expected "solutions"
with the starter alone
(msg 11193). A five-clue board
is playing the exact game the designers set. The 464 stands sixteen edges below
the full solution, and that gap is itself a datum.
Five-clue record boards (464 → 460)
Every board below is a full 256-piece layout that respects all five official clues, scored by matched edges out of 480. Benjamin Riotte's 464 broke Bruno Gauthier's 460, which had stood since 2023; Igor Pejic reached the same 463–464 range independently. These are the boards a verification link was shared for — the full census is far larger (10 boards at 464, 290 at 463, 2213 at 462, 38 at 461). Click any board to re-score it edge by edge in the viewer.
Distinct boards reported by score
| Score | Broken edges | Distinct boards found |
|---|
| 464 / 480 | 16 | 10 |
| 463 / 480 | 17 | 290 |
| 462 / 480 | 18 | 2,213 |
| 461 / 480 | 19 | 38 |
The author's own count. Many boards at the lower scores are close variants within one basin, so the raw totals overstate the number of structurally independent solutions.
460 · 28460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 61460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 61460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 61460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 61460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 28460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 32460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 34460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 38460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 46460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 51460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 57460 tiles from the public 460
460 · 60460 tiles from the public 460
Spiral-in partials, all five clues
A parallel, different pursuit: partial boards that place as many pieces as possible while respecting all five official clues, built by a spiral-in fill. The number is the pieces placed, not an edge score. Peter McGavin and Patrick Hegland posted these to the groups.io SAT thread in 2024; One Small Step continued the line on Discord in 2025–26. The counts are re-verified from each board. Thanks to Peter McGavin for flagging that the SAT-thread boards belonged here.
Peter McGavin · all 5 clues
Peter McGavin · all 5 clues
Peter McGavin · all 5 clues
One Small Step · all 5 clues
One Small Step · all 5 clues
One Small Step · all 5 clues
Peter McGavin · all 5 clues
One Small Step · all 5 clues
Patrick Hegland · all 5 clues
Other partials & run-length records
Kept for the record, but off the clean ladder above: boards that respect only the starter clue, boards from a source without piece ids (so clue compliance can't be verified), and boards reported as a continuous-run length rather than a placement count. Each is labelled with its caveat.
One Small Step · clues unverified · continuous run · continuous run of 227 before first break; official clues not respected
One Small Step · clues unverified · continuous run · continuous run of 229 before first break; official clues not respected
Peter McGavin · 1/5 clues · starter piece only, clues not respected
David Barr · clues unverified · hints not verifiable (no piece ids in source)
One Small Step · 1/5 clues · linear · linear run; 4/5 clue cells occupied but only 1 holds the correct official clue
David Barr · clues unverified · 7x7 hole; hints not verifiable (no piece ids)
This site's own experiments produced four boards worth keeping, labelled for
what they are: experiments several steps below the community line, and
documented end to end. Each links
to the experiment that found it; every score is recomputed from the board's
own edges.
The project's best, found by reading the whole corpus of strong boards to
separate genuine shared structure from shared bad habits, then attacking the
traps. The full story is in
the PALIMPSEST experiment.
Score recomputed from the board's own edges; it matches the claim. Open it to check every edge.
Open in the viewerBuilt from scratch by letting three learned signals vote on every placement,
reaching 460 in a board family no earlier search here had cracked;
see KEYRING. Its mismatches band in the
bottom rows, the mirror image of McGavin's 469. That scan-order fingerprint
is explained in Where the mismatches live.
Score recomputed from the board's own edges; it matches the claim. Open it to check every edge.
Open in the viewerFrom scratch plus destroy-and-repair, breaking construction ties by where
pieces tend to sit in strong boards (see
PRIOR).
Score recomputed from the board's own edges; it matches the claim. Open it to check every edge.
Open in the viewerThe same beam search run across nine
scan orders so it lands in different regions of board space; the zigzag order
found this 458. The full run is written up in
GAUNTLET.
Score recomputed from the board's own edges; it matches the claim. Open it to check every edge.
Open in the viewer