
Creating Personalized Jigsaw Puzzles (2014) - the-enemy
http://ivrl.epfl.ch/research/jigsaw_puzzles
======
baldeagle
First: That is a really neat algo for solving how to make fiendishly difficult
very custom puzzles. I might pay for that as a service.

Second: I feel that the pieces are too unique; and that might distract from
some of the enjoyment of the puzzle. Perhaps if the variance was lowered so
the pieces seemed more uniform....

~~~
imperialWicket
Not strictly related, but on your second point -
[http://www.libertypuzzles.com/](http://www.libertypuzzles.com/) makes some
really great puzzles that have very unique ("whimsy", iirc) pieces. I've
gotten a few for my children and found that I enjoy putting together the
easier puzzles as a speed challenge. The unique pieces make "timed-runs" quite
interesting.

------
ElijahLynn
And how long until this particular method is turned into a turnkey service
where I can upload a picture, configure a few slider variables and have it
shipped to my door?!

------
gotofritz
AKA "Creating insanely difficult puzzles that will drive you potty"

~~~
ibuildthings
One of the authors here. Since it is a optimization, the difficulty can be
controlled as a parameter ( the lambda parameter in Eq.1 in the paper ).

But you are right, some of the puzzles can be super-hard ( for example, the
Seurat puzzle ) that we used to joke between ourself to name our paper "taking
the fun out of puzzles".

Personally, what was fascinating for me is the shape of the puzzle curve it
produced. Most of the common puzzles are grid based (i.e. four neighbours - up
, down, left, down ). But in this scheme, there can be strange neighborhood
pieces, with even stranger shapes.

~~~
icefox
Exactly what you said, this solution doesn't make super-hard puzzles, it makes
not-fun puzzles. The obvious next step that I would challenge you to do would
be to optimizes for puzzle cuts so that they _do not_ follow the main color
lines of the image as much as possible. This would result in pieces that are
just as interesting, but produce puzzles that are radically more fun to
actually put together.

A good puzzle will not bore the player. Boring is that there are many blue
pieces that all look exactly alike. Trying each one over and over is not fun.
But with a tweak to your technique you could make sure that every blue piece
that can contain another color would, thus increasing the variance of unique
pieces which is not boring for players. Finding a blue piece with this little
bit of brown and a spec of purple means the player can get to remember that
and hunt for where it could go which is the fun part of puzzles. Do that and
you can approach puzzle companies to license them a tool to make more fun
puzzles and they will buy it.

Now of course your tool can't solve everything you can still end up with
rubbish like: [http://www.amazon.com/USAopoly-M-Ms-Puzzlemania-
Puzzle/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/USAopoly-M-Ms-Puzzlemania-
Puzzle/dp/B000OM99KG)

And in contrast a really good puzzle that at first glance looks like it is all
one color, but filled with so much detail it is a blast to put together.
[http://www.amazon.com/Ravensburger-78000-Fire-
Dragon/dp/B000...](http://www.amazon.com/Ravensburger-78000-Fire-
Dragon/dp/B00005S0JJ)

~~~
ibuildthings
Pushing away from color lines is very easy. For negative values of lambda in
Eq.1 of the paper, (i.e. reverse the cost for color lines ), the optimization
tries to push the puzzle shapes away from the color lines. We had tried a few
in this configuration, but personally my co-authors and I liked the puzzles
generated by the scheme of adhering to the color lines.

Hardness/fun factor in puzzles is a matter of personal taste. Hence the
ability to personalize is very interesting. Not everyone like to solve 10000+
piece puzzles , nor color line adherence, but people invest time and effort in
solving them.

