Jigsaw Puzzles – Incremental Improvements and Backtracking Strategy

There is a great variety of different jigsaw puzzles. They can range from the easiest ones with not more than hundred pieces to fit together, up to the extremely hard ones with more than five thousand pieces. There is always only one solution to complete the jigsaw, but there are numerous ways to come to that solution.
When you spend hours and hours trying to complete one jigsaw puzzle, with each piece that you correctly add to the completed part of the puzzle, you are one step closer to solving that puzzle. Also, you gain an additional improvement. This additional improvement can help you solve the puzzle faster and easier. Another way when you get the incremental gain is when you put two pieces of the puzzle together, but you haven’t still found the place of these pieces in the main puzzle.
Here is a piece of advice for all of you who have difficulties putting puzzles together. We can think of the puzzle as consisting of the ‘edge’ part and ‘interior’ part. Try to separate all the edge pieces and then put them together. By doing this, you should get the frame of the puzzle. The interior should be filled in with the rest of the puzzles. This may be easier for some of you puzzle-lovers, because the number of the edge pieces is smaller than the number of the interior pieces.
The most difficult thing related to the jigsaw puzzles is when you come across two completely the same pieces of the puzzle. They have the same color and the same shape. In that moment, a lot of people give up on solving the puzzle. But you should actually never give up. Even making a mistake is better than giving up. You can always undo any of your moves and correct the mistake easily once you have noticed it. This is known as a backtracking strategy, which proved to be very useful in putting the puzzles together. Revision is very important for anything you do in life, and so it is important for puzzle-solving. Think about any sportsman; for example, about any famous tennis player, like Rafael Nadal. He always tries to make some improvements in his game in order to be number one again. Nadal had to make a major change in his backhand and in order to do this he had to forget, and to unlearn his already-existing backhand and to learn his new backhand. This is a typical example of backtracking. Consider doing the same when putting a jigsaw puzzle together. It will be very useful to you.

All in all, putting the pieces of a puzzle together should first of all be an interesting activity. Do not give when the first serious problem comes on your way. Try to use your incremental improvement. And when a mistake occurs, do not panic and try to find out where it occurred and try to solve it.