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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."
! means factorial dude.
Impossible. Anyone who had seen the image would be a gibbering heap of insanity, and unable to tell you the pattern. At best you could hope to get enough clues to figure out the pattern yourself... but if you assembled it, you'd either off yourself or also turn into a quivering mass of human flesh.
The key here is to get someone else to assemble the image... you'd find a likely mark (some kind of paranormal investigator, for instance) and then mislead him into thinking the image he's assembling will *stop* the summoning of Cthulhu. Drop enough clues in the right places, use decoys to mislead him of your true intentions, let him be an ignorant pawn in your great game. With luck and skill, you can get him to do the dirty work for you. And the irony of him contributing to the Great Awakening by striving against it is quite delicious.
At least, that's the way I'd do it. Your way is too direct, and not worthy of true evil genius.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
OK, the last two are technically cheating, and all but the first option would possibly require custom code since all the example images appear to be 15x20 portraits, but a suitable algorithm probably wouldn't be that hard to figure out. I saw this on Firehose last night and worked out a few likely routines this morning, so I'd expect some custom FL/OSS code (and cheap Chinese manufactured knock-offs) to be available in fairly short order. After that the race will be on to create the largest most impressive image before the fad inevitably passes.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Assuming all pieces are used, and that none of the pieces are symmetric or identical (that is, all pieces are different, and each rotation is different), then the actual number of possible images comes out to:
9*(4^300)*(300!)
where 9 is for the number of possible rectangles (1x300 up to 15x20), 4^300 accounts for the rotations of each piece, and 300! accounts for their arrangement.
The result, according to Python, works out to around 1.143*10^796, which is large, but not infinite.
I saw this at Tokyu Hands a couple days ago. Now I know what it was. The picture is only just barely similar to whatever photo you send them when you look up close. You have to view it from far away to have it appear to have the detail of the photo.
but you can make anything with it. That's like saying you can convert any picture to a 15 by 20 pixel JPEG; technically you can, but the usually the result isn't worth looking at. That said, I'm sure a lot of people will send in pr0n to convert into patterns, just to see what it looks like in ultra-low resolution monochrome.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
there was a exclamation mark. 300 factorial, 300 x 299 x 298 x 297x ... x 2 x 1.
Incidentally, if anyone wants to calculate that, you'll need to use a float, and probably a double-, or quadruple-precision (YMMV) one at that.
If you're computing an integer-valued function, the result should be an integer. In Python, which uses arbitrary precision integers by default, it's as simple as:
>>> import math
>>> math.factorial(300)
306057512... [truncated to get past the lameness filter]
JPEG chunks an image into 8x8 blocks. An overcompressed JPEG contains so little information per block that the blocks devolve into simple gradient patterns (try this yourself with a grayscale image: save it with a quality near "0" and you will see the individual blocks clearly). If you think about it a bit, this makes sense: the block is being approximated by a combination of a small number of cosine waves (in the limit, it's a single wave along each image dimension), so the result is a gradient, because most of the coefficients have been thrown out by compression.
In this sense, the puzzle pieces can be thought of as representing these simple block patterns. With a 15x20 rectangle of pieces, by JPEG standards, this is essentially an overcompressed 120x160 image. You'll note that if you take your overcompressed JPEG and scale it down to around 25% (30x40), then, provided the original image shows only a single subject, it should still be reasonably recognizable, because the human visual system patches together the pieces to produce a coherent image, even if it is highly distorted.