Has Eternity II been solved?
No. The complete solution has never been found, by anyone, human or machine. The best board anyone has ever built matches 470 of the 480 internal edges. Ten edges still stand between the community and a finished puzzle, and that gap has not moved since 2021.
Blackwood's 470-edge board. Ten of the 480 internal edges do not match; every other edge does.
The facts, in brief
- The prize expired unclaimed.
- Tomy offered $2 million for the first complete solution. The competition ran from 28 July 2007 to noon on 31 December 2010, and closed with no winner.
- 480 is the target.
- A finished board has 2×15×16 = 480 internal edges that must match, side to side. The frame's grey outer edges are not counted. A score of 470 means 470 of those 480 edges match.
- The record has stood since 2021.
- The climb went 467 (2008), then 468, 469, and 470 (2020–2021). The 470 has been equalled but never passed. The last ten edges are the hardest part of the puzzle.
- Boards using the five optional clues are tracked apart.
- Tomy sold four clue puzzles that each fixed one more piece. The best board respecting all five clue placements is 464 (Benjamin Riotte, July 2026), which beat Bruno Gauthier's 460.
About those “480 solved” boards online
Several boards posted as 480/480 are real solutions, but not to this puzzle. They use different piece sets: Brendan Owen's smaller Clue-1 and Clue-2 designs, the unframed TopCoder variant, or boards that mix pieces from several expansion sets. Those solutions do not transfer to the official Eternity II. The official 480 remains unfound.
Why the last ten edges are so hard
Eternity II was engineered to resist search. There are on the order of 10560 ways to arrange the pieces, and the puzzle was generated to have close to a single solution, right at the point where the problem is hardest. Getting to 470 is already the work of purpose-built solvers running for tens of billions of steps. Closing the final gap is a different kind of problem: it needs a better idea, not just a faster machine.
Common questions
- Has Eternity II been solved?
- No. As of July 2026 the puzzle has never been fully solved. The best public board matches 470 of 480 edges (Joshua Blackwood, 2021), tied but never beaten, and no perfect 480-edge solution has ever been found.
- What is the record score for Eternity II?
- 470 of 480 matched edges, set by Joshua Blackwood in 2021. Earlier notable boards reached 467 (Louis Verhaard) and 469 (Blackwood & McGavin).
- Is the $2,000,000 prize still available?
- No. The prize deadline passed on 31 December 2010 with no complete solution submitted, so the $2,000,000 went unclaimed and the contest is closed.