Let me tell you a very short real-life story.

The year was 2008. A colleague told me about this thing called Eternity II puzzle. What was it? Some toy company was selling this 256 pieces puzzle (scrambled of course), and every piece was a rectangle, having different models on each side.

Side pieces only had 3 sides, the 4th indicating that it's a margin.
Corner pieces only had 2 sides, the other 2 indicating it's a corner.

There were no identical pieces, however there were only something like a dozen types of models. Very few actually. So, it was very easy to find and match 2 pieces together, and even 5 pieces together.

In fact, it was very easy to find and match hundreds of pieces together. The goal was to complete the puzzle using all 256 pieces, and claim a reward of 1 million $ if you were the first to do it.

The problem here is that this puzzle was developed in collaboration with a mathematician. The number of models for piece sides was calculated in advance to be at a minimum, but still for only ONE SOLUTION to exist. This drove people crazy, since it was seemingly a very easy task, even for a bedroom floor on a rainy day.

It wasn't hard to find the piece models (though it was illegal to make them public) and start throwing a brute force attempt at it.

However, that proved to only fill up something like a stack of 200 pieces, with 56 remaining pieces never finding a valid next spot to sit on. Of course, the first 200 pieces always stayed the same more or less, since the back track was back tracking, well, slow, due to the many matches being available.

So then came random picking: randomly pick some next piece and try to match it somewhere randomly.

This proved to be a much better strategy: since the pieces were put at random, many variants came up where I had like 230 pieces, and 26 pieces that remained, that had nowhere to sit. Sometimes less, sometimes more pieces matched in total.

Then came genetic algorithms, since it was my PhD thesis topic at the time. So, start off from some good random partial matches (the best ones), and start mutating some pieces here and there, removing randomly a few. Now, with this, I got somewhere at about 246 pieces matching in total. The last 10 pieces didn't find a spot anywhere. However, much better han both brte force or random search.

After a few months, full of experiments and Terminal colored grid display of solutions advancing in real-time, I decided to shift+delete the entire project.

This was the only time in mi life where I intendedly deleted a project I worked on, so to never touch it again or try to reconstruct it. I had in there even PNG files with the pieces, to display the solutions as if I owned the physical puzzle. It was becoming an addiction. Not just for me - I exchanged a lot of ideas with my colleagues, we all had different strategies and code to solve such an easy problem. And the 1 million $ prize didn't sound bad.

I guess we're now in 2025. The Eternity II puzzle was, AFAIK, never solved up to this day. We didn't even had CUDA at that time. But I'd say that it would not have helped anyway, and it would not help today as well. Why? Because the puzzle was developed in such a way to have a gazillion impressions that the puzzle is on its way of being solved, but you might as well end up with the last 2 pieces not matching.

But I bet that if someone would engage of rewarding a solver with, maybe 100 million $ in prize, everyone will get crazy on it (the deadline expired in 2011 btw).

What's the idea here: addiction can cause big problems. It can make you see things unnaturally. I'm sure a psychologist can explain it better.