Jigsaw time

It being the New Year, it is jigsaw time again. Which, in the course of completing the bottom row, gave rise to the following.

All these bottom pieces were pretty much alike, permutations of prongs and holes aside, which meant that it was easy enough to make a mistake. Which I did.

This despite looking along the row from low down, to get the help of the slanting light from the front window, when I was not sure. Presumably the same help as you get when trying to read an inscription on an old grave stone from the side. Or the old glyphs on a Mayan temple.

The symptom of the mistake was that a distinctive mark on one of the pieces did not match up with another mark in the body of the jigsaw above, as suggested by the picture on the box. Maybe a piece width out of place, probably not two pieces width - although it was hard to be sure given that the connection of the bottom with this part of the body was a little sketchy.

Now, in general terms, if one wants to perturb a row slightly, say where the red dot is above, I can remove a left combo of one or two pieces from the right and insert it at the join above the red dot. Or in the case of the green dot above, I can remove a right combo from the left and insert it at the join above the green dot. In the case of a one piece combo, I get a shift of part of the row by one position, in the case of a two piece combo, by two positions.

Now in the present case, the piece in the wrong position was to the right and needed to be moved one position to the right. The row only contained one one piece combo and this was to the left. So the answer was probably to swap the one piece combo on the left with a matching two piece combo to the right of the piece which was wrong. Which massively reduced the number of possibilities to check and I now have a bottom row which I think is right.

So the question for today is, do you need to be able to articulate the problem in this sort of way in order to be able to solve the problem in reasonably short order?

First, we will have the people who do not like jigsaws and who are not much good at them. So they won't do much articulating.

Then you get the articulators who do.

But I believe that there are plenty of jigsaw buffs in the middle who can just gaze at the puzzle and come up with the right answer in a small number of tries, without resorting to long-winded, systematic trial and error of all the permutations. And, without going in for conscious articulation. Bearing in mind that it is entirely possible that the brain does that under the covers.

PS: I learn in the margins that while I can scale all the members of an object selection in Powerpoint by size, it does not necessarily do quite what you want. The (sometimes irritating & intrusive) cleverness of Bing only gets you so far. But to be fair to Bing, it did bring up the right section of Powerpoint help fast enough.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/01/jigsaw-17-series-3.html.

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