Eternity2...ending?

[Bender10]

I just received this e-mail from the project owner.....

:-(


Thanks to all the contributors to the Eternity2.net project!

Collectively we have over 1.6 TeraFlops of processing power working on
the puzzle, and have performed over 10^19 CPU operations!

The highest scores achieved by eternity2.net users are in the mid
460ish range. (/480)
(although we don't discuss/publish the details anymore in case this
leads to an entry being disqualified)

The big news is that I have decided to stop maintaining the
eternity2.net project.
There are several reasons - eg
1) Takes a bit of time
2) Takes a bit of money
3) Expected monetary return is estimated to be $0.000000000001 (insert
your own estimate here...)
(although the possible $10,000 for highest score probably raises the
expected return into the few hundreds of dollar range)
4) Xmas is coming and I want to forget about computing for a while :)
5) The main reason I created the site wasn't to solve the puzzle via a
brute force backtracker. This was always clearly going to be
impossible.
My main goal was to become the world expert on the puzzle, and to be
the main point of contact for anyone who had a good, novel idea
for solving the puzzle. This goal has largely been achieved. Thanks
to all the people who have corresponded with me, and shared their
ideas.
None of these ideas has proved to be sufficient to solve the puzzle,
but I've learnt a lot about a whole range of interesting things :)
6) I was determined that if anyone was going to solve the puzzle, it
would be me. It appears likely now that the solution will never be found.

I'll probably leave the site running for a few days yet, and open
source the code.

If anyone is desperately keen to take over the eternity2.net site (and
is a programmer, and knows how to run a BOINC web site), then let me
know. The entire setup of the site is contained in a single (linux)
VMWare image which I've
been running on a simple Windows XP box on my home computer.

Cheers and Good Luck!
Dave Clark
eternity2.net
eternity2.net@gmail.com

[PoorBoy]

I received the same E-Mail, I never ran the Project so it's no big deal to me anyway. Somebody else might take the Project over so those that want to run the Project still can ... :icon_neutral:

[Bender10]

me neither, just an info post. If you had an account, you got an email...

You had to buy the game, then identify all the pieces, and generate a text file....

It's interesting that a solution has not been found yet. I don't know, I never followed the project.

[NeoGen]

I tried some workunits with the dummy file they had on the site for testing. It was ok. It's a pity that it's shutting down. Maybe someone can pick it up and keep it running?