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How did a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher go on to create the world's richest puzzle? Karen Tay investigates. Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, couldn't solve one of his puzzles.
But now Christopher Walter Monckton, third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, wants to make sure that someone from New Zealand has a chance at being the first to finish one of his creations. Eternity II, the sequel to the bestselling Eternity I, which was never launched here, was released yesterday and carries a $US2 million ($NZ2.5m) prize-tag for the first person to come up with a solution to the puzzle. The winner could come from any one of the 100 countries where the game is distributed. "Literally, it could be a kid of eight or a gran of 88," Monckton says.
Monckton, 55, is on the phone from a hotel in the UK - he lives with his family in Scotland. A former policy adviser for the Thatcher government, whose political involvement these days centres on trying to debunk theories of global warming, Monckton admits to a lifelong fascination with problem-solving. The 12-piece puzzle he made as a gift for the prime minister (she was "rather fond" of them) before he left 10 Downing St remained unsolved for two years - until someone from her office called, begging him for a solution because nobody else could crack it.
"In fact, there were 156 ways of putting the pieces back in the box, and they couldn't even find one," he laughs. Eternity I, which sold more than 500,000 copies, took 18 months to solve. In the end, two Cambridge mathematicians took out the $2.6m prize. Monckton explains they finally cracked it with the aid of two home PCs, using what is called "brute-force search" - a system of combinatory mathematics that will find all possible answers to a question through a process of elimination. It is commonly used for jigsaw puzzles. Monckton attributes the win to "one small, but stupid mistake in the design". He had made some of the pieces easier to fit together than others, and the two winners exploited this flaw by doing the hard pieces first and leaving the easy ones for the final, most difficult stage. This time around, the loophole has been closed and he says the puzzle cannot be solved by higher mathematics. "I think it's much more likely that someone will use the intuitive method of seeing patterns in the pieces." Monckton has some advice for potential players: study the pieces carefully, understand the rules - which are simple but important - and check that you've got all the pieces. They are numbered from one to 256, and are bordered by coloured patterns which must be aligned across the whole puzzle. Considering Thatcher and her office couldn't solve his 12-piece puzzle in two years, this latest puzzle will be no easy challenge to put together. Asked how Thatcher had reacted to Eternity I, he chuckles: "She enjoyed it, and I think she was quite amused that one of her advisers had come up with such a weird idea." To make things a bit easier, Monckton has provided some clues for Eternity II. The puzzle will come with one piece in place on the board and two other "clue puzzles" you can buy and solve separately. The clues are 36 and 72 pieces each and after you've finished one and registered it on the website, an email containing directions on the location of another piece of Eternity II will be sent. Monckton is no stranger to designing puzzles. He previously created one in the shape of a heart at his wife's request, using what he calls the "semi-regular tessellations" used by Islamic artists. "I developed a puzzle by breaking that pattern into pieces. Each of the 20 pieces are different and in two completely different styles - you can make a heart shape." There are a thousand solutions to that problem and he hopes to market it someday. But there are potentially millions of solutions for Eternity II. It's based on something known as the P=NP conjecture, which states that, in theory, one might be able to solve even the most complex problems using some new mathematical device which we don't understand yet. In other words, if you were to use the same method which solved the first puzzle to try and solve the second, it could take a computer millions of years to go through all the different possibilities. The Clay Mathematics Institute in America is offering a $1.25m prize for anyone who solves P=NP. And Monckton believes that whoever cracks Eternity II has a good chance of providing the solution to the conjecture as well - thus winning another million. He refuses to entertain the possibility that no one might win the prizemoney, and offers the following incentive for anyone thinking of joining the multimillion-dollar race: "People know I'm good for the cash and you can have the pleasure of taking on a member of the crumbling British aristocracy for a large amount of money." |
