Pentominoes are planer objects made up of 5 squares touching side to side. There are 12 unique shapes.

The puzzle is to arrange the pieces into a 6 square by 10 square rectangle. There are thousands of solutions. Here is one of the solutions.

I wrote a program to find all the solutions. It took the program (on a 12MHz i286 PC) twenty-seven days to find all the solutions. With today's machines, these can be solved much faster.

The pieces can also be arranged into 5x12, 4x15 and 3x20 rectangles. There are only 2 solutions to the 3x20.

I made this puzzle out of 3/4" pine, so each piece was basically 5 3/4" cubes. I wondered whether you could arrange the pieces into a 3 dimensional block. I found that you can make a 3x4x5, 2x5x6 and 2x3x10. I modified the above program to find all the solutions for these as well.