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.
Eternity II has an official story (a launch, a $2,000,000 prize, a deadline) and a real one, which played out on a mailing list. This page is the real one, compressed to its turning points: the moments that actually moved the puzzle, each one a single line you can read at a glance.
For the whole account in prose, the history is told in two parts: part I covers 2000 to 2009, from the group's founding to the first scrutiny prize; part II covers 2009 to today. Every milestone here links into them, and to the archive message where it happened.
Brendan Owen starts the eternity_two group, more than six years before the puzzle exists.
TOMY releases the 256-piece puzzle in July. Within a fortnight the list has digitized it and called it unsolvable.
Owen and Stertenbrink derive that ~17 interior and ~5 border colours sit exactly at the unique-solution boundary.
Louis Verhaard's eii solver reaches 467/480, entered under his wife's name. It holds the record for twelve years.
The competition ends at noon on 31 December. The $2,000,000 goes unpaid; the puzzle is still unsolved.
McGavin solves Owen's hint-free 10×10 in ~180 core-years, landing inside the theory's predicted error bars.
Yahoo Groups is erased. Members move two decades of the mailing list to groups.io days before it vanishes.
An outsider posts a 468 on Reddit, open-sources the solver, and the record climbs 468 → 469 within weeks.
Joshua Blackwood reaches 470/480 with a retuned schedule. No one has beaten it since; the last 10 edges hold.
Jef Bucas reaches 470 again with restarted threads of Blackwood's solver, the first independent tie of the record.
The best board respecting all five clue placements rises from 460 to 464, the first movement on that line since 2023.