A practical guide to jigsaw puzzles.

Chuck and some people came over and helped me do a puzzle. He gave us an important algorithm for working puzzles.

1.) Arrange pieces by their knob/antiknob structure

Pieces with standard connections can be classified unambiguously by finding the longest string of knobs and labelling them in a counter-clockwise fashion. Pieces are named as follows:

4-knob.

3-knob-antiknob.

2-knob-2-antiknob.

knob-antiknob-knob-antiknob.

knob-3-antiknob.

4-antiknob.

Other important classes of peices are:

borders.

And finally the pieces with non-standard connections are known as the

weird beards.

Construction.

Now that we have all the peices arranged by their knob/antiknob structures, in each open space, we try every possible piece with a conformable knob/antiknob structure. We repeat this until the puzzle is finished.