The World’s Fastest Puzzle Solver (It’s a Robot)

Mark Rober built a robot that solves jigsaw puzzles and pitted it against Tammy McLeod, one of the world’s faster human solvers. The design and build process is fascinating, especially the fine-tuning enabling the robot to “wiggle” each piece into its place.

When we first tried to assemble the puzzle, almost none of the pieces fit together perfectly. This was before we had corrected the errors in the computer vision code as described earlier.

However even after we improved the computer vision code, some small errors remained. Many pieces would fit together perfectly, and then you would see one that was ever so slightly out of place, and that could ruin the alignment for the rest of the puzzle if left unresolved.

To solve this, we took inspiration from humans. If you try to place a puzzle piece with your hands, you’ll find that often you need to wiggle the piece around to get it to snap into place. So we programmed the robot to do the same thing.

Also, Kristen Bell shows up?

• games
• Mark Rober
• puzzles
• robots
• Tammy McLeod
• video