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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."
It's a puzzle when you have a specific image you're recreating. If you aren't, it is then just a toy... or perhaps an artistic medium.
Puzzles require thinking and solving.
This is a cardboard version of pixelblocks.
http://www.pixelblocks.com/
The maximum number of ways you can arrange 300 things is 300!, or about 3.06 X 10^614. Granted a very large number, but definitely not infinite.
Okay but what if there were 301 pixels, would that be infinite?
And anyway, since pedantry loves company, I'll point out that 300! is the maximum number of orderings of 300 things, not necessarily the maximum number of arrangements. How many arrangements there are depends on what you consider the "rules" for a free-form puzzle like this. Since the pieces do have interlocking teeth I'm going to say that minimally the pieces have to be interlocked (otherwise the possible arrangements truly would be infinite to the extent the universe is), but beyond that does it have to have a specific geometry like 15x20? Does it even have to be rectangular, or can it more resemble a game of dominoes?
The enemies of Democracy are
Seems an awful lot like the Lego mosaics that people make. Lego also did a mosaic product for a while where you could upload an image and they would send you parts and instructions for making the image with 1x1 Lego plates.
I believe there is even software now to make the 'maps' yourself, much like cross-stitch, etc.
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