Jigsaw Puzzles and Problem Solving

Here’s the most direct way that becoming a speed builder in the jigsaw puzzle world can change your approach to other types of problems: Ignore the assumed rules. There’s a conventional wisdom regarding the right way to start a jigsaw puzzle. If you poll a room on how to do a puzzle, 90% or more of the audience will likely describe the same system.

That’s because 90% or more of the audience will be casual puzzlers. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you do want to improve (which generally means building faster in the jigsaw puzzle world) you have to be willing to challenge the conventional wisdom.

Here are the three most common “rules” accepted by casual jigsaw puzzle people:

1. Flip all the pieces before beginning.

2. Assemble the border first.

3. Work your way in from the edges.

That third one is slightly less common than the first two, but common enough to get called out by competitive jigsaw puzzle folks, who generally eschew all three of these guidelines.

Take a closer look at that second rule, completing the edge pieces first. Most people do this because that’s the approach they learned from their parents, but does it really help you construct quickly?

Consider a 1,000 piece puzzle with typical piece shapes — these generally assemble in a consistent grid, around 34 columns and 28 rows or vice versa. That’s 124 pieces. So, first, you invest the time in identifying just over 10% of the total pieces.

Ironically, the closer you get to completing that task, the harder it gets. When there are ten edge pieces remaining, you’re looking for them amongst nearly 900 other pieces. You can spend a great deal of time on what was supposed to be the “easiest” part of the puzzle.

Depending on both fit ambiguity and art ambiguity, it’s entirely possible that the completing the border won’t help you at all with the interior. In those cases especially, your time would have been better spent working from the inside toward the edges, saving significant time on the border. I’ll talk about those techniques in other articles.