Worlds hardest jigsaw vs. puzzle machine (all white)

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"If at first you don't succeed, reduce your expectations until you're a success" what a line

Loved how you were like "Luckily, I only have to do this 1 time" "2 times" "3 times" . Video was fantastic! I love your content!

I love the grounded reality of this channel!! Despite the recession, I'm so happy 😊 withdrawing my $94k profits out of my investment with a platform in town™√

This is an incredible video and is so inspiring to me. Like the whole thing is a collection of impossible levels of frustration, failure, changing expectations, and perseverance. The fact that this project, which some would call a failure, is still such an objective success as a lesson in computer science and the realities of practice instead of theory makes it such a beautiful video. It's just like you said, the journey was the destination. Thank you for always creating such great content.

That moment I realized that you were basically taking the integral of the edge of the puzzle piece was amazing! That is so clever!

“It is, without a doubt, THE hardest project that I’ve done.” I love how this is how he feels after every project. Shane rules.

It's insane to see you work. You're amazing and very, very gifted. Thanks for the incredible videos!

This is a very good summary of programming. The journey is very interesting and the destination is very satisfying, but some problems on the way can drive you slightly insane.

Here's a question: Was the white side of each piece well defined? I've seen puzzles that are printed on BOTH sides, so you don't know which side is up.

Boy, this project looks like it took a piece of your soul with it. But good damn job, man. And hey, hilariously, despite all the months of time this has taken, it is in fact still faster than doing this by hand.

Honestly, reducing expectations and being able to accept "good enough" is an incredibly powerful and important skill for an engineer to develop. It's not being lazy, it's being efficient with your time.

Your tenacity is inspiring. Or frightening. Still processing that choice. That said, I loved the video and listening to your process. Thank you.

This video came out at the same time as my robot uni project, which was simply to place 15 cubes on a grid in different patterns. I got humbled real quick

great video! really love the time lapse at 17:17 - inspiring! your videos always help me learn and make me laugh!

Wonderful engineering video ! I love that you show that solving complex problems takes time

Anyone that knows anything about automation knows how ridiculously hard of a challenge this is. Your projects are all so intense dude, love it!!

Really awesome stuffs, Learned a lot with them : )

Love my Puget Systems machine!! And the people there are amazing, never gotten so much help troubleshooting from a computer company. And love your amazing videos too!!!❤

Thank you for taking the time to simplify into digestible pieces

you know what i absolutely love about this build, aside from the feat of engineering? the fact that this machine is not truly "useful", it has one purpose which is to complete puzzles but the entire purpose of a puzzle is that you do it yourself for fun, it's not a job or a task that needs to be performed in mass. how often will you have to solve a 5000 piece all white puzzle that you need to make a machine for it? who is in the market for this machine? so in that sense the journey really was the destination, the satisfaction of seeing the functioning machine comes from the hours and hours of manual labour and problem solving that went into making it. in the end the puzzle-solving machine is a puzzle itself- it's very complicated, it took a long time to finish, once it's finished it no longer has a purpose other than to exist, and the maker gains enjoyment from it's completion :)

That assembly time lapse was so satisfying

The amount of time you had to spend scanning the pieces must've been eye opening for you. Thinking about the sheer duration of it alone, my mind wanders off to the repetition of work people have to do in third world countries like China where they'll spent their entire day glued to a chair doing the same thing over and over and over and over again.

I want to come back in a few years to see how this machine has been improved

I'm amazed at the approach you came up with to solve your all-white puzzle. Do you know that the German Frauenhofen Institute developed a similar computer program (ePuzzler) in 2003-2013 for the torn files of the State Security of the German Democratic Republic. But they had the problem that the torn edges partially overlapped. Unfortunately I couldn't find a website in English about it.

Bravo! I've been programming for decades and your approach to matching puzzle pieces was impressive. I have a slightly similar programming story. There are old text-based predecessors to MMORPGs called MUDs. Big online multiplayer text based games, loosely based on Dungeons & Dragons game mechanics. To oversimplify, the game worlds were a bunch of areas, each area having rooms connected NSEWUD. Areas were cities, forests, etc. Keep in mind these are text based games, so they don't really fit together spatially in rational ways like modern graphical MMORPGs. I wanted to dynamically build and store an ASCII art "map" of each area, every time the MUD server booted up, so it needed to be somewhat efficient. To do this, I picked one room to start from in an area, and recursively walked from there to all the rooms in the whole area, giving each room an x,y and z coordinate based on the path taken. Recursion has pitfalls, but it was easy. It made spaghetti look organized. At the center of a city area could be a city park, with many rooms in the park, but each road around the park's perimeter could consist of just one or two rooms. Coordinates for rooms overlapped and were pretty much useless. The solution I came up with was funny. I did recursive walks from all rooms as starting points, to all rooms (SIZE*SIZE; moar recursion!). This would make hundreds of sets of coordinates for every single room. Then I did the clever bit: (To avoid doing slow floating point math) I multiplied each room coordinate by the total number of rooms in the area squared (or cubed? it was a while ago) and then I just averaged each room's x's, y's and z's together. It worked 99% of the time. Some tricky areas with literal one way streets and such would be skewed, but that was no big deal. I was just happy it didn't slow down the server boot up too much.

Great video. Would have done edge detection for the edge (case ;) pieces though, might have avoided the bug.

Love your videos man. Being an engineer myself I spend half my time deciding whether a long, tedious task is worth automating or doing it manually because “I only have to do it once”. 99% of the time I should’ve spent the extra time automating. Keep these awesome projects coming, they are extremely entertaining! P.S. I am a logic designer and electrical engineer at Lockheed, if you ever need anything PM me

Some of the best videos on KZworld, hand down.

Man, I really think this was the best ending of all of your videos. I was laughing out so loud when I saw your facial expression after your wifes comment 🤣...

Not only could a TV show never be able to produce a segment like this, it would never be as good. this is peak youtube. you took months and months to make a single segment, and its amazing

impressive!!! reduced expectations are a good thing when trying to move forward. i am fairly certain you could go back and tweak all those lowered expectations up to 100% correct. lol. seriously your my hero

My senior design project in computer science was solving puzzles with computer vision like this. Only instead of all the machinery, we assembled it all with software and made the completed product visible on a GUI. We were able to get up to 2000 piece puzzles with minimal errors. We didn't go for all white puzzles, but that is an interesting challenge. It's cool seeing the similarities and differences in how our software decomposed and solved the puzzle!

Hi, I wonder if there is another way. I would like to try my own algorithm. Could you provide the pictures? I really don’t want to go through the same hell by making my own puzzle and scanning all pieces. Best regards

WOW mindblowing, I love your channel since the beginning !

You did an amazing puzzle assistant. Much better than a boring puzzle solver who can make it all alone and without knowing the power of friendship

Awesome video! You should have a go at making a robot that can play the amazing game Klask, seems like it might be an interesting project

I’ll never not appreciate the amount of time, dedication and energy Shane puts into his videos🙏🏻🙏🏻 keep it up man! We all love it!

I have been working on this initiative for over a year (not continuously of course). Now your video motivates me to pick the project up.

I'm curious why you decided to remove the fuzzy edges from the (first) puzzle in realspace rather than recalculating the shapes to make them match.

I am a programmer thinking "this guy does such cool stuff" as he says "you should consider becoming a programmer". I laughed out loud at that moment 😅

This is exactly how I do puzzles. Note, I always get tasked with the solid colour sections. Lol

You guys damn near frying your brain is why we have so much cool stuff. Thanks 👍🏾

17:46 the simple answer is the first overlooked and often times the simple answer is the solution. Or at least a road to it. Look closely at the stacked pieces, they share at least one identical (or close enough to identical for the robotic eye) edge. Possibly eliminate this with a redundant position verification system maybe?

Your presentation for algorithms and top holiday destinations with no robots made my day....

As a programmer, I'm intrigued with the algorithmic possibilities that could be applied regarding your earlier data sets - do you have your various scan sets that others could play with to see if they can find clever ways to massage them into finding the connections?:

"If I wrote my code in something like C++ I would still be writing code - so I like this trade" - Best line of the year

That's why tackling each of the sub problems formally first saves you a lot of migraines 😅

Bro you just helped with my own vision project I didn’t realize I could just mark stuff out with lines

This is nothing less than incredible!

This is awesome! Also, I definitely learned something: Before spending hours of preparing my whole data set (or puzzle pieces) for a yet unproven algorithm (like matching sides that could fit together), make a quick test with reduced data set to see whether it works in principle :D

Love this man and his wife, awesome couple, brillant minds, beautiful sense of humour. Now truth be told😅, there must be a priority CIA, NSA or FBI list out there where these two birds are listed as priority humans for extraction and protection in case of alien invasion, extinction space threats, nuclear disasters etc etc.. 😂😅 God bless America 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Never tired of watching your video! Could use some assistance if possible. I am a farmer in NE Indiana and I do a lot of field drainage tile. I have been looking for years for someone to build a small vehicle or robot with a camera and an under ground locator. This would need to be remote controlled. The purpose would be to drive unit up field tiles to map where they run or to find a blockage. I have contacted Purdue university and also multiple other universities along with hours of Google searches and phone calls with the same answer. It can't be done. Any help?

The physical world is so messy. That’s why I love programming games, where everything works 100% of the time and you never run into weird edge cases.

Seems the optimization could have been also on data formatting. - That is by creative negative offset represantation of piece where negative side of piece 1 should be matching the positive side. - Format the data where you simply look for your answer (positive match negative) However.... 4 sides. Your approach, singles to quads etc., is neat.

Legitimately the only creator who completely brightens my day when I see they’ve posted a new video. Love everything about this guy.

3:22 "Thank goodness I only have to do it once." Why do I feel like this _can't_ age well? 11:17 "Thank goodness I only have to do it twice" 12:35 "Thank goodness I only have to do it three times" 15:30 "Thank goodness I only have to do this four times"

During the assembly, numerous pieces are placed by the device in stand alone locations. If the designed process is to compare sides and identify matches, how does the drive know where to place pieces with no match in stand alone locations?

Well done sir! But, you never said anywhere how long the algorithm took to solve it? (In terms of raw compute time, not wall time.) Or did I miss this somewhere?

Damn, this Austin Powers guy is really smart. Well done!

I'M SLOWLY GOING TOTALLY INSANE...lol. Nothing short of amazing projects on this channel. Hats off to you sir. Very impressive, educational, and inspirational project as usual. Your drive is something of wonder. Thank you.

Love the video. It's actually the flaws and the problem solving that made me stick around. You did really well. But I do hope that you get those bugs fixed and help the machine / program work more smoothly. What satisfaction it would give if you were able to pull it off without human intervention. Lastly... the wife thing is really hilarious. All that work and your wife is like 'meh'. Makes you want to implode. Totally relatable. Good job and more power to you.

Maybe vibrating the table could slot some of those pieces into place? Or adding a "probe" to push the piece down after dropping it might also help

Wow! You've got be a super brainiac to figure out how to make the computer learn to solve this puzzle! Both the hardware and the software.

I love this Chanel and the way he shows the problem & then find the solution for them !!! Hat off!!

Somehow this is both the funniest and most educational channel I watch on the regular. "That takes about eight hours, so I'm glad I only have to do it [number] times!" had me cracking up harder each time

Do you make a G-code interpreter for your CNC projects?

Great video your skill and patience are next level. I wonder if a vacuum table would help pieces not move

"Thank goodness I only have to do this one time" "Thank goodness I only have to do this two times" "Thank goodness I only have to do this three times" "Thank goodness I only have to do this four times"

What a job !!!! You need to have sort of a rolling pin to flatten your pieces.

The fact that you are so raw when you talk about you struggles is incredibly motivating. It's really hard to imagine the amount of work and worries and trial and error that go into projects like these when you see the finiahed product. So for that : a big massive thank you.

You could have used a kernel method to smooth the edges of the puzzle pieces images. This would have solved the problem. You didn't need to make your own puzzle with clearly delineated edges.

Since many manufacturers use specific cutting dies for their puzzles, can you cheat and have your algorithm check to see if the puzzle matches a known die in order to greatly speed up processing times in subsequent runs.

You should've first made the puzzle robot to solve an image puzzle, so that you would've gained experience or failed faster and also at least you would've known where the problem happened. But anyways, love your content.

I should think that it might have been interesting to have left the picture on the jigsaw. It gives you the opportunity to quickly and easily check if the computer was 100% accurate, using the amazing facility - eyesight.

I admire not only your genius, but also your ability to explain very advanced concepts in simple to comprehend ways, and your honesty about your mistakes. Fantastic work!

Ah great now I'm just going to see puzzles as recursive issues, solve a 2x2 many many times, then a 4x4 less many many times then...a 4000x4000 once...

First of all: Mad respect for all the work you did and sharing it with us! :)) Secondly: WHY oh WHY did you use a 4000 (!!) piece puzzle while developing your solving technique? Wouldn't a 40 or even 400 piece puzzle make the process sooo much faster?

16:25 "If at first you don't succeed, reduce your expectations until your a success" 😂

The practical application for this, for reassembling things that broke apart. Plane crashes, unplanned rapid disassemblies, etc..

This is one of your best episodes. Not only for the engineering project, but also for adding some philosophy / poetry perls like: "If at first you don't succeed, reduce your expectations until you're a success" or "There is something poetic on two pieces missing".

I love all the little easter eggs in this video!

I love your wife's line! That's what mine always says too. Must be genetic

I did a similar program algorithm to solve a game of boggle. The brute force way of solving a board is an option, but not efficient, nor cool. If you pick a starting block, it only touches at most 4 other valid paths. If the path has letters that aren't possible to be a word, cancel the path. It's a word hash table sorta thing, like GPS uses to make a route. I had a file of words I acquired that was basically a dictionary dumped into a txt file. Also at the time, would solve a board in under a second, and this was years ago. It was cool to play the computer, but I'd never beat it, mainly because my vocabulary wasn't near what the computer had in that text file. It's a fun project, you get file I/O, recursion, matching, and efficiency practice. Cool video.

You solved this impossible puzzle in 4 months rather than 10+ years. Technology is awesome

Increíble video; even got teary eyed in the Timelapse part

12:00 is a really annoying problem for regular puzzle solving too. Revensburger puzzles are nice and crisp

I am a Software Engineer and i am going to show this video to some friends and family if they ever ask me again why the computer/software is not doing what they want. To tell a program to do exactly how it should be is hard to imagine. For the human mind its so obvious and yet a program needs some help to understand what you are trying to do. Awesome project! You are the best!

I think he is arguably the most brilliant guy on youtube.

What I like about you is you aren't afraid to admit your mistakes. You actually embrace them and let people know what went wrong or why things didn't work. Some people out there pretend they are so smart and get everything perfect on the first try everytime. Thanks for being real

At the end there were apparently 2 missing pieces. BUT - when the software was trying to match edges, at 9:49, it said there were 4002 pieces. I think the view of the jigsaw at 17:32 shows that it's 80 pieces wide, hence 80*50=4000, rather than 69*58=4002 or 87*46=4002. So maybe Shane accidentally scanned a couple of them twice?

This is beyond amazing ...

I agree, you didn't 100% build a puzzle solving robot, but you built something that the build process itself made it worthwhile.

It could have been done in no time by the algo if the puzzle was digital!

Gotta love the absolute gems he drops in on his computer screen in the background.

Your wife is a gem. Thanks Bob

I think my wife would have said something like "I thought you did something cool, like in the youtube videos you watch"🤣

Regarding that last column, isn't the number of columns divisible by 4?

You should definitely keep at this problem, but make it a side project.

As an automation engineer this blew me away. Keep doing crazy stuff like this!