Hamster posts an FPGA based Eternity II solver. Is there still a $2M bounty for solving this puzzle?

FPGA hacker extraordinaire, aka Hamster, just posted VHDL code for an Eternity II solver via the Papilio forums. More details and full code can be found at his wiki, and if you are like me you have never heard of the Eternity II puzzle before. Wikipedia has our back with an in depth article on the topic.

Apparently the Eternity II puzzle was released in 2007 and has never been solved despite the fact that a $2 million prize was offered for a solution. Its not clear if there is still a prize available, but solving this would be quite an accomplishment!

Hamster says that he has explored the puzzle using other techniques but never felt that an FPGA was suited to solve this puzzle. He recently had a flash of inspiration and realized a new approach that would be well suited for an FPGA. He quickly put his idea to code and found some good results. Head over to the forum to see what he found. 🙂