66 hours of Double Retrospect

I finished the first of 32 images! This feels great and I feel like I am on schedule to finish orange and the second image in a about 2-3 more hours (The closer to finishing a color the faster it goes). I really would like to be done with that color before I leave for Seattle leaving on red and yellow to finish section A.

Double Retrospect after 66 hours

Section A-3

Section A-2

Section A-4

Section A-1

Blue Completed

I finished blue tonight on Double Retrospect Section "A". My next color is orange and that will complete images 2 and 3. Total time to date 60hr.

My guess is that I have no more than 30 hours left but more likely 24. So this would put the estimated time to complete the entire puzzle at 84x8 = 672 hours. This would be equivalent to working a full time job for nearly 17 weeks.

My puzzling rate for this puzzle is roughly 48 placements an hour which is about half of my normal rate of 100pieces an hour. 

Blue completed in section "A"

Darwin does his first real puzzle!

Today my son completed his first 60 piece puzzle. I helped him a bit to get started, but he completed it on his own for the most part! I'm so proud of him!

Double retrospect progress

55 hours of work to date. Spent 4 hours last night sorting blue and finishing the floor of Section "A-4" and a bit of the double man in section "A-2". I had hoped to finish blue last night, but hopefully tonight.

All of the blue pieces sorted for section "A"

Showing how the puzzle has two identical pieces per section, so you can use the adjacent column to help you find the correct piece. Here I had already completed pink in Section "A" Image 3 so I could use it to help find the blue in Image 4.

The blue floor of Section"A" image 4 completed.

Starting the double man in Section "A-2"

Eternity II Puzzle

The Eternity II Puzzle

So we received the puzzle that to-date, no one has been able to solve. For those of you not familiar with the puzzle, it a 256 piece puzzle with 23 different patterns on the pieces. The goal of the puzzle is to assemble the puzzle so that all of the edges align with they gray pattern on the edges. Oh yeah, when this came out on 2007, the first person to solve it my Dec 30th 2010 would be awarded 2 million dollars. The date has come and gone, and no one solved it. If you think it would be a simple issue of getting a bunch of computers together to try each possible placement, it wont happen. The number of possibilities is  in the order of 10⁶⁰⁰.which is beyond the imagination of this author (a trillion dollars is 10¹² as an example.

Here is a small 4x4 example (The actual puzzle is 16x16)

4x4 Example of how the pieces go together correctly and a "solved" pattern.

So there are a lot of smart people out there working on this project. Here are a couple of links to work I find will be basing my work off of:

Tom needs an intervention

New Puzzle Day!

Mercedes ordered two new puzzles that showed up today! A 500pc from Master Pieces called "Pansies and Puppies" and a 1000pc from Piatnik called "Cocktails". M really wants a boxer puppy, but we are going to settle for a puzzle of one for now. The cocktails puzzle is self explanatory!

We really like the Piatnik puzzles. We just finished the Pencil Collage earlier this week! The pieces feel very good in the hand, have a good size and a very satisfying click when placed! M likes to snap them hard!

This will be our first Master Pieces puzzle. We wil let you know how it goes! We bought both puzzles from www.simplepastimes.com  so far, perfect service!

Cocktails (1000pcs by Piatnik)

Pansies and Puppies (500pcs by Master Pieces)

Double Retrospect Progress Report

Last night I finished pink in section "A" while M finished our first Venice puzzle and started the vintage Lighthouse 500pc from Clementoni. It took about 5 hours to do the pink in total. I feel like I have found the "tricks" to completing this puzzle.

We ended up puzzling until 2:30 in the morning and getting pretty punch drunk on lack of sleep. I really love staying up late and puzzling at the table with M. We end up making fun or each other and laughing ourselves silly. Apparently, I do this thing where I place three fingers on the puzzle while I hunt. M calls it my puzzle hug!

Since this is our first blog, here are the progress photos to date!

The puzzle arrives!

This is what 32000pcs look like! We are gonna need a bigger  table. M is in the background, she is thinking, fuck this puzzle!

Starting the sort of section "A"

Time for a beer

Sorted!

SO MANY PIECES

The army of white pieces. The section in foreground is 500 pure white pieces to search through of  "standard" pieces (2 out 2 in tabs). I soon seperated these into horizontal and vertical pieces effectively cutting the search space in half! Very helpful tool to solving this puzzle!

Progress! The puzzle repeats itself. It is cut as 1 picture wide and two pictures tall and then all pieces repeat. Therefore, each section has exactly two identical pieces. This makes it easy because shen you fine once piece , you can easily find its partner while doing the border and double your efforts! once i discovered this, it goes much faster!

I quick message to M!

Section "A" frame completed! Now I can break the frame onto the much more manageable puzzle boards and get  the table back!

Green Completed!

Green Completed!

Green and Pink Completed