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"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."

5 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Sweet by Narpak · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:Sweet by CptPicard · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
  2. a few pictures are worth a million words by Bourdain · · Score: 5, Funny

    a few pictures are worth a million words

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

  3. do not taunt happy fun puzzle by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Funny

    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."

  4. Re:infinite? by ChrisCampbell47 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 :)