"Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores In Japan 241
Riktov writes "I came across this at a Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo.
This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures."
JPEG (Score:5, Interesting)
Not quite. (Score:5, Interesting)
It appears to be monochromatic and it also used nearest-approximation algorithms... Which means that the extra pieces are inserted as "random noise" once the general shapes are mapped out. Clever, but... low resolution.
Re:Not quite. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:puzzle? (Score:4, Interesting)
It came with a few patterns to copy from (tiger, city landscape, I can't recall the others, since I never did them).
Unfortunately, there was no www at the time, so no website to submit pictures to for patterns. One of my brothers did make some nice pictures based on photographs.
The memory is a bit hazy, but I know the company that made it was asian (I remember there were pictograms and poorly translate English on the box).
I know, I know -- cool story bro.
wasgij puzzle (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:infinite? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:puzzle? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd swear that it almost looks like a tool to teach someone about basic JPEG encoding.
Re:love the name (Score:3, Interesting)
"Jigazo" means "self-portrait" in Japanese. Clever naming.
Re:Legos? (Score:3, Interesting)
What makes this different from Legos, pixelblocks, ASCII art, or even a JPEG image, is that the selection of pixels/pieces is predetermined, limited, and they must all be used to make the image. For all those other forms you're allowed to pick the closest color value for each pixel.
With this puzzle, supposing you did it manually, scanning row by row, and picking the best-fitting piece for each pixel. It'll look great at first, but soon you'll be running out of good matches and having to choose less and less optimal pieces; you can't say "give me a 45% with a sideways gradient" when you've used them all up. So the algorithm has to consider how to distribute all the pieces throughout the image for the optimum match.
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)
We couldn't find their puzzle among the puzzle pieces of Berlin. We did find the documentation, but unfortunately that's enough to drive men mad also.
Re:infinite? (Score:2, Interesting)
The result, according to Python, works out to around 1.143*10^796, which is large, but not infinite.
This brings up an interesting point. Although infinities exist, there are some things that are very large, but not infinite.
Take a 1 or 2 mega-pixel image (or bigger or smaller). There is a finite number of possibilities. It is almost like there is a finite amount of things to see. What if you had time to see all those?
The same applies to DVDs, or Blu-rays. What if you had time to see every possible DVD?
Would there be anything left to see?
If my computer could create truly random videos I guess with enough time I would get Star Wars on Blu-ray.
But it's not a puzzle anymore! (Score:3, Interesting)
There are no differing nipples and holes anymore, so you can’t fail anymore. Which means that you can put it together in a wrong way without noticing. Oh, wait, there is a list of how to put it together, killing the whole point of putting a puzzle together.
I don’t think that that way it will have any chances, after this little hype is over.
Re:infinite? (Score:3, Interesting)
At first I thought the number was wrong because of all the zeros at the end, then it quickly dawned on me that with all the 10s and 5s you should expect a bunch of zeros. However, trying to verify the quantity of zeros, I'm having trouble figuring out where they come from (I double checked with perl's Math::BigInt library, and your number is correct...or at least the quantity of zeros is).
There are 74 zeros there. Obviously we can expect 1 zero for each multiple of 10 we multiply by (so that's 30 zeros), plus 100, 200, and 300 each give an additional 0 (thats 3 more zeros). We also get a zero for each 5 that's multiplied by a 2, 4, 6, or 8, though we're limited by the number of 5's so it doesn't matter which number you choose (that gives us 30 more zeros).
So, we've got 30 + 3 + 30 = 63 zeros. Where do the other 11 come from? I'm feeling kind of dumb about it (probably overlooking something very obvious), but I just can't figure it out.
Re:infinite? (Score:3, Interesting)
It figures....I thought about this a long time before submitting and couldn't come up with anything. As soon as I submit, it dawned on me that each multiple of 25 actually counts as an extra 5, though the multiples of 100 already exhibit the extra 5. So we get 25, 50, 75, 125, 150, 175, 225, 250, and 275 giving 9 more zeros. 2 left to go. 125 and 250 also count as a third 5, so that's our last two.
That was a fun and pointless exercise.