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A GROUP OF MIT boffins have come up with some natty technology that allows a computer to solve jigsaw puzzles.
According to a paper with the catchy title "A Probabilistic Image Jigsaw Puzzle Solver", which will be presented to the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June. The idea was dreamed up by Taeg Sang Cho.
It can solve puzzles created from complex images like landscape photographs and can handle an almost unlimited number of colours.
It has already solved a world record-setting puzzle with 400 pieces, beating the previous effort for computerised jigsaw solving.
Cho's technique uses simple squares, forcing the AI to rely entirely on colour and pattern recognition.
The software first scans for broad colour patterns, and by comparing those to a database of known images, arranges the pieces in an approximation of the final picture.
There is no indication if the thing tries to find the corners first.
Cho believes his technology will eventually find its way into photo-editing software, where its new colour matching and edge detection techniques could create "more realistic manipulations".
So it's not just about taking the fun out of working out jigsaw puzzles, although we're not sure that we ever found them fun. µ
robot-arm
if the solution only occurred on the computer? Jigsaw puzzles suggest an actual physical puzzle.
So, unless the pieces were moving around on the screen to show it being solved, I think it's just fun computing.
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