"Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores In Japan

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."

Comments

Sweet

[Narpak]

Now tell me the pattern for creating an image of unspeakable evil; like the Great Cthulhu.
Cthulhu fhtagn! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ia! Ia! Ia! The sleeper awakens!

Re:Sweet

[CptPicard]

You must be new here, it should be obvious. Send the company a picture of goatse, and have your pattern...

Well... not infinite.

[pwnies]

And 300 pixels are worth 3.060575122 * 10^614 pictures

Fixed that for you.

a few pictures are worth a million words

[Bourdain]

a few pictures are worth a million words

Especially when the accompanying text is in Japanese and I can't read it

Re:a few pictures are worth a million words

[Anonymous Coward]

Moreover, not only their faces can also face other people. Even great men in history, even heterosexual love, even in the face of the pet ... "If life on Earth, even in the face any" I would make! What kind of mechanism and say something, but ... Well anyway, let's say that you actually try.

I happen to read Japanese fluently, but this was worth it.

Re:Looks familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Racist!

Wow

[esocid]

You can even make a 404 error out of it!

do not taunt happy fun puzzle

[SuperBanana]

It essentially has a fixed histogram. I wonder what you'd get back from them if you sent them an image specifically designed to be hard to fit into that histogram...

A squad comprised of a Ninja, a gradeschool girl with magical superpowers, a vampire, and a giant robot. On your doorstep. With a note that politely says, "Do not taunt happy fun puzzle."

Re:infinite?

[jameskojiro]

But 41,000,000,000 is the largest number in Maths.

Some have speculated there may be a larger number: 41,000,000,001?

Re:infinite?

[ChrisCampbell47]

The result, according to Python, works out to around 1.143*10^796, which is large, but not infinite.

37 minutes.

As I read "infinite" in the summary, I thought "OK, let's see how long it takes for one of these yahoos to calculate how many combinations there really are", since it is of course not infinite. The post went up at 6:02pm, and the parent of this post went up at 6:39pm. Congratulations :)

Re:infinite?

[derGoldstein]

You people and your "math speak"... Maybe he was just excited to type the number 300? Did you ever consider that? Huh?

Also, he could have meant the bitwise operation. Which means it could have been interpreted as "300... NOT!".
Broaden your horizon, dude.

Re:infinite?

[derGoldstein]

Higher precision, please.