We got a beautiful puzzle of London, England. Its a lot of fun to work on since I used to live there, even though the folk-style painting is nothing like the city. There are people swimming in the Thames River. Gross. I had forgotten how much fun jigsaw puzzles are.
Jigsaw puzzles are a lot like programming. There’s a lot of prework involved before you start or else you’ll end up wasting time. The planning process involves deciding your plan of approach, usually using a design pattern like “find the edges.” You need a large workspace to fit your puzzle, just like having a good monitor and software. Next involves a lot of sorting by color and region. Perhaps you abstract the puzzle and work on a section in another part of the room while your family works on their portions. The debugging is when you can’t find those last 4 edge pieces. When you’ve placed about half the pieces, it is a matter of picking a piece, matching it to the picture, and placing appropriately. This finally goes pretty quickly.
I love puzzles, except the lie flat on a table which is really hard on the back when you like to stand up and hunch over. Perhaps that’s why I’m a programmer who faces his workspace straight on.
The presorting of pieces is actually an interesting optimization problem. My grandma always gets out about twenty little tupperware dishes and lids and sorts anything that can possibly be recognized. My younger sister just dives straight in without any sorting.
My mom and I tend to take a more balanced approach: sort the edges (and maybe obvious things like sky, if you feel like it) as you turn over the pieces, then let people sort out their own things to work.
My mom and I did a puzzle today, so I was thinking about this. Not in such algorithmic terms, but in terms of optimal sorting strategies.
Also: you work puzzles standing up?