"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

infinite?

[token_username]

More like 300! I'd say.

Re:infinite?

[token_username]

! means factorial dude.

Re:infinite?

[Zocalo]

Not necessarily. There are 300! sequences of the pieces, but you also need to allow for a few more variables:

• Rotation of pieces that are non-uniform in colour
• Multiple arrangements - 15x20, 10x30, images etc.
• Not using all the pieces - a 17x17 image for instance
• Combining multiple sets of the same colour
• Combining multiple sets of different colours

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.

Re:infinite?

[nneonneo]

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.

Re:infinite?

[1729]

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]

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.

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

[Red Flayer]

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.

Re:Sweet

[CptPicard]

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

Re:puzzle?

[Toonol]

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.

Well... not infinite.

[pwnies]

And 300 pixels are worth 3.060575122 * 10^614 pictures

Fixed that for you.

Re:Well... not infinite.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it 300! (number of complete board possibilities) * 4^300 (rotations of all pieces)

1200! implies after you place one a certain way, you have 1199 more possibilities, which is untrue; you have 1196.

1200 * 1196 * ... :)

JPEG

[Quietust]

Seems remarkably similar to how JPEG compression works. Not surprisingly, the resulting pictures look a lot like overcompressed JPEGs.

Re:JPEG

[nneonneo]

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.

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!

Not quite.

[girlintraining]

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.

[Kazoo the Clown]

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...

Wow

[esocid]

You can even make a 404 error out of it!

Re:puzzle?

[sexconker]

Puzzles require thinking and solving.
This is a cardboard version of pixelblocks.

http://www.pixelblocks.com/

Re:puzzle?

[Red Flayer]

I had something similar as a kid, but there were two colors of varying saturation. Grey (from black to white), and gold (from almost white to intensely saturated). The pieces were different shapes, though, so there was a puzzle aspect to it, though all the pieces were some number of squares in different configurations (like tetris pieces, but more shapes in different sizes of 1 to 10 or so squares).

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.

Re:puzzle?

[Kagura]

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.

Re:Oh Come ON!!!

[Chris Burke]

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?

It's just a bad compression algorithm

[Locke2005]

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.

Re:puzzle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds much like oil painting. Up close it looks like crap, but stand a few feet back and it looks great.

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."

Lego Mosaic

[LoudMusic]

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.

Re:puzzle?

[shentino]

I'd swear that it almost looks like a tool to teach someone about basic JPEG encoding.