Solve The Ultimate Puzzle!
You may have heard of The Ultimate Puzzle and the 15,000 Euro prize for solving it (competition now closed). Details can be seen on The Ultimate Puzzle website.
The puzzle is challenging, fun, and Rubik-like in its addictiveness. Solve it once and there are plenty more solutions to search for. It's a great buy for all ages and will take several lifetimes to exhaust the possibilities using brainpower alone.
The Ultimate Solver is the perfect companion to The Ultimate Puzzle!
Main features
- Solutions database with 229,205 unique entries
- Solutions browser with multiple ways to navigate
- View and print solution diagrams
- View all solutions, mixed-side only, or single-side only
- Enter a part-complete puzzle to find possible solutions
- Intelligent piece selector for easier manual solving
Why get The Ultimate Solver?
- When fun turns to frustration, The Ultimate Solver provides the answer. No matter how often you bail out, there are always more solutions to try for
- Avoid wasting time on dead ends by discovering whether a part-complete puzzle has solutions. You can find out without viewing solution diagrams
- Create easier puzzles by starting with a part-complete puzzle known to have many solutions
- Create harder puzzles by finding a starting point with few solutions
- Enhanced manual solving in the pattern editor, due to its point-and-click interface and highlighting of unplayed pieces that fit a location
- Encourage frustrated children by showing them that solutions are possible
- Discover novelty solutions in which rough and smooth sides form a letter, regular shape or pattern
- Impress people with your genius for coming up with solution after solution when they're struggling to get anywhere!
Price... only UKP £5
Compatibility
The Ultimate Solver runs on Windows systems only. It has been tested with Windows 98SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP.
How to buy
- Download the installation program from here and run it
- Click here to begin the payment process
- Activate the program with the license file you will receive
- Without a license file, The Ultimate Solver runs in a demo mode with some functions disabled
Important
- The Ultimate Solver is of no use without The Ultimate Puzzle
- The Ultimate Solver and its author, Ian Sharpe, have no connection with the manufacturer of The Ultimate Puzzle
- I do not sell The Ultimate Puzzle. The manufacturer's web site has a list of national distributors
- The Ultimate Puzzle design and trademark are owned by Netisys Ltd, Cyprus
MUQ heap (A pile of Made Up Questions)
Wasn't using a program cheating?
The competition rules did not forbid entry of computer-generated solutions.
Plenty of people have programming skills. Writing a solver for The Ultimate Puzzle is not trivial, but neither is it astrophysics. I know for sure that one other entrant submitted solutions generated with his own software. It is likely that others did too, and these people gave every possible answer.
In that case, if you didn't submit all 48 correct entries, you were wasting your time submitting any.
If you can't program and couldn't solve the puzzle unassisted, The Ultimate Solver gave you a chance of winning the big prize.
Doesn't your program spoil the fun?
Only if you let it.
Whether or not you entered the competition, The Ultimate Puzzle provides endless hours of fascination and mental exercise. The price is very cheeky for a few bits of plastic in a cardboard box, but unbeatable value per hour of IQ-stretching entertainment!
I highly recommend using The Ultimate Puzzle as intended and gaining all the benefits it has to offer.
The Ultimate Solver is designed to enhance your ownership of The Ultimate Puzzle in the ways suggested above.
Why aren't the piece shapes predefined?
Because I would be reproducing the design of The Ultimate Puzzle, which I neither own nor am licensed to use.
A simple point-and-click system enables you to reproduce the puzzle shapes from your Ultimate Puzzle in about five minutes.
The Ultimate Solver is designed to be very easy to use for owners of The Ultimate Puzzle without breaching copyright, but of no real use to anyone else.
How many solutions does The Ultimate Puzzle have?
The manufacturer claims 'Over 250,000 incorrect solutions' and required 48 smooth-side solutions for competition entries.
I assume 'incorrect solutions' means solutions in which both rough and smooth sides are showing.
The Ultimate Solver finds 229,205 unique solutions, including 12 single-side solutions. These can be rotated and flipped to give 1,833,640 patterns.
Extensive experience and testing suggest that 250,000 is a rounding up of the true figure for marketing purposes, and that the 48 competition entries are in fact 12 unique solutions, each of which can be rotated four ways.
I have been in contact with another programmer who got the same results independently.
On 15 November 2006, my competition entry was validated by the sponsor and put into the winners' draw, thus removing any remaining doubt over The Ultimate Solver's accuracy.
Isn't the puzzle easy if it has so many solutions?
No, it's very challenging. 250,000 is a very tiny fraction of the total number of ways you can arrange 16 pieces. I calculate that 250,000 is 0.000000000000000000034 per cent of the total! The rest are wrong.
Upgrade policy
Should any upgrades be produced (unlikely now that The Ultimate Solver has been proved accurate and, as far as I know, free of other bugs), they will be free to licensed users.
