This page contains all information you need to get started and run the EII solver.
As it is illegal to publicly distribute the Eternity II pieces in any way, you must first buy the Eternity II puzzle in order to be able to use the solver. See the official www.eternityii.com web site for more information.
Please download and unzip the following file:
Currently only Windows is supported.
The solver needs a text file with name e2pieces.txt that contains information about all Eternity II pieces. This is quite a lot of job. Fortunately there is a tool called e2editor that has been written by Dave Clark that can assist you. The EII solver supports the format of the e2editor. Please follow the instructions in http://gpu-grid.net/wiki/index.php/The_e2editor_program#The_e2editor_program.
The file e2pieces.txt should be saved in the same directory that contains the EII solver.
If you have a single core machine: invoke the "run_1_eternity" bat file. Use this bat file also if you have a multi-core machine but you do not want to assign more than one core to the solver.
If you have a dual core machine you can run two instances of the EII solver by invoking the "run_2_eternity" bat file. If you have even more cores you can also choose to run the run_3_eternity or run_4_eternity bat files.
The solver will run on lowest priority, so under normal conditions you should hardly notice that it is running.
Each time the EII solver finds a new high score, it will save it as a file with with a name like "462.eii". These files are encrypted. The solver also updates periodically a file called total.txt that contains status info.
The solver runs locally on your machine and does not use any connection to any server. Therefore it is your own responsibility to contact me when you find a new best score. This is done in the following way: the first time you can contact me is when you have searched at least a total of 10 000 G nodes (I mean the total of all your machines/cores). You contact me by sending an email to eiisolver@gmail.com. To the mail you should attach file total.txt, which I can use to check what your high score is.
Note that this file total.txt does not contain any information that I can use to reconstruct your high score, so I cannot "steal" your high score from you and submit it without your knowledge. I will reply to your mail (please forgive me if I do not answer fast enough). If your score is not better than my best score, you hopefully keep on searching. From that moment on, every time you improve your personal score you should send me a new email.
Hopefully on some beatiful day you find a score that is better than the best score that I have submitted. In that case we will sign a more formal agreement stating that we will share any prize money on a 50-50 basis. When we have signed the agreement you send your high score to me and I will submit the solution to the Eternity II adjudicators.
Please do not send the .eii files! Although I assure you that I also in that case would share prize mony, I just would prefer not to get into a situation where I send you a reply "sorry, the score was not submitted" but you suspect that I did anyway.
Please note that anyone who publicly reveals detailed information about the Eternity II pieces or about having found a solution will be disqualified by the Eternity II judges. Although it is a bit unclear if this also applies to high scores, the Eternity II community has chosen to follow the practise to not communicate any high score over 463. So please follow this practise and do not publicly disclose your high scores, at least not until January 2009 when the winner has been announced.
Since January 2009, a decoder is available that can be use to decrypt .eii files.
Please download and unzip the following file to the same directory where eii.exe is located:
Now run eiidecoder.exe. The program will search through all sub-directories and convert all .eii files to a file in human-readable format (file with extension .et2) and a file that can be read using most Eternity II viewers (file with extension .txt).
The et2 file is a text file that shows a view of the pieces and their rotation. For example 159/1 means: piece 159, rotated 1 x 90 degrees clockwise. The first line contains the pieces on row A, the second the pieces on row B, etc.
The text file is a file in "hint" format used by most publicly available tools for Eternity II; the first line contains the number of pieces, each other line contains the locations of one piece, for example a line 159 12 10 1 means: "piece 159 is located on the 12th column, 10th row, (i.e. position J12 on the Eternity board) and is rotated 90 degrees clockwise".