A jigsaw puzzle seems really simple, and is easily solvable, right? To humans, it's a breeze. However, if you tried to ask a robot to figure out a jigsaw puzzle, it would take intense amounts of coding and programming by the human to get the robot to get anywhere CLOSE to finishing even a two piece jigsaw puzzle!
Don’t believe me?
Here’s why:
There are 4 key components to our human body that make it so fun and simple to solve easy jigsaw puzzles:
Every mammal has the same amount of bones in their arms. So if bats had the mental capacity to solve one, they theoretically should be able to make a jigsaw puzzle…right? No. it’s the configuration of the bones that matters: The human bone configuration is extremely complex and important, because of the thumb. Imagine trying to quickly solve a two piece jigsaw puzzle with using any part of your thumb…that would be very difficult
Although this is almost 2nd nature to us humans, robots and other mammals don’t have the same mental capacity to see the piece and send a wave through the brain that stimulates the hand to twist the piece. Even though it seems simple, it is MADE simple by our nervous system, brain, and hand. And all of this happens in fractions of a millisecond! AMAZING!
Probably the biggest difference, Humans are able to figure out where a piece goes, whereas robots would have to be programmed many many many times to grasp even the close proximity of a piece’s location. It’s really difficult to explain, but basically there are many ways to figure something like this out: it could be a corner piece, it could be a certain color, it could be a guess, and there are many other ways in which to figure out where a piece goes.
There’s a tiny space between each piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Over a small puzzle, this is only a small problem. But in enormous puzzles, the stretch can become 1-2 centimeters, which means that if one piece is out of order, the rest that are layed down will be popped up above the rest of the puzzle. But humans can tell when its popped up and can wiggle it into place. It seems simple, but is actually highly complex.
In the end, jigsaw puzzles are actually highly complex, but seem simple to us crazy smart intelligent humans.
(Idea and points taken from Mark Rober)