Worlds hardest jigsaw vs. puzzle machine (all white) 

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"If at first you don't succeed, reduce your expectations until you're a success" what a line

Damn I cannot even imagine how stressful it must be to make these projects. Devoting months to these insane projects that could very easily end up failing, all to entertain strangers on the internet. I have mad respect for that.

I don't know if you'll see this comment in a sea of 12k comments, but I really really really REALLY appreciate how you showcase your successes AFTER a series of failures. Code bugs are a part of the process, and I so appreciate your willingness to share those. There are many other channels that filter out the failures. Awesome job. 🙏

Retired programmer here. I would have debugged the process with a much smaller puzzle first, but you got there in the end. Kudos.

You know when Stuff Made Here says that he has tried to solve something for weeks, he has *literally spent weeks trying to solve it*

The humor in "Thank goodness I only have to do this X amount of times". I'm dying. Well done, sir!

I imagine that this would be an absolute hit at an art establishment or children's museum. It would get many people into Engineering.

As a Mechanical Design Engineer, my mind just went bullocks looking at how Software and Design Engineering has Integrated and how you solved the problem sequentially, Mechanically I suppose you can do way more precise movements, but what you have done has just peaked the whole project!! Love to see such videos, I get inspired to learn and get to enjoy Engineering!!

I like how the third monitor says, “I’m slowly going totally insane” and then shows top vacation destinations with no robots

IMPORTANT TIP: Having spent a decade making laser cut jigsaws I have learned that if you cut it UPSIDE DOWN the slight bevel caused by the tapering of the beam focus works with you to iron out slight misalignments when assembling it. Wonderful, wonderful work and a joy to watch.

“If at first you don’t succeed, reduce your expectations until you are a success” That is the best philosophical phrase I’ve heard. Ever.

As a programmer I can totally feel you saying: "It is an awesome job", while feeling some resignation and just being happy to not touch the code again :D

As an automation engineer this blew me away. Keep doing crazy stuff like this!

“It is, without a doubt, THE hardest project that I’ve done.” I love how this is how he feels after every project. Shane rules.

The details on the screens in the background. The only having to do something X amount. This man iterates his videos for improvements just like his creations and even includes Easter eggs… Like everything about how his brain works is amazing. I don’t think I really looked up to anyone in my life or have someone I would say is or could be a roll model for myself but seriously this man is a role model to me. So many amazing things to look up to and value. Thank you Shane for everything you do and please keep doing the things as long as it makes you happy. I am so glad to see how many people value what you are doing and are supporting you. 🙏

Dude, just found your channel, not only are you super smart, but a comedy genius. When you said "than god I only had to do this once" I was already sus, but the 4. time I was crying. Also the fucking top screen is hidden gold from " im slowly going totally insane" to if dogs can start a YT channel and the vacation without robots. God damm this was a treat^^

The thing I like about this channel is that you have an idea, you scurry off and do it, and then post what you've done after it's all finished. There's no hurry to 'feed the algorithm' at the idealized pace, or keep up with current events. It's just good content, delivered after its actually finished and properly documented. I admire that a lot.

Looking forward to part 3, where the expectations gnaw away at your soul until you have no choice but to revisit this project until it's fully automated.

Brief version of this fascinating story: human beings may be slow, but they're amazing

Watching these videos brings to light just how complex, amazing and precise our own bodies are. It also highlights how much success there is in "failure". To me the Success line is more about recognizing your achievements over dwelling on what still needs to be perfected. Love the humorous ending, months of work and she immediately recognizes 2 missing pieces. It also illustrates that the biggest (and least appreciated) part of a successful project is the R&D.

I mean, you're not wrong - your original goal was to create a robot, to enable yourself solving this puzzle faster than it would normally take, which you estimated to be one year. And look at you go, done in 5 months! The highest level goal was absolutely achieved! :)

i love the "I'm slowly going totally insane" message in the background, really shows how time consuming the process of this project was.

Congratulations! This is what makes this nation so great. All across the nation people are solving the worlds puzzling problems, bit by bit. (Pun intended) I know I for one am proud of you!

The life lesson: start smaller, tweak as you go, and only then move to larger scale... that said, my hat off to you for not giving up and making it work!

what I love about Shane is that he also shows the fails - engineering is hard and a lot of trial and error - but succeeding like in this video feels great

At 19:29, I thought you were gonna say became a patreon/member or something, but you said, "consider becoming a programmer". That took me by surprise haha.Thanks for inspiring millions of people around the world to pick up programming as an awesome hobby/career.

That was one of the most interesting RU-vid I have ever seen. But, I have a PhD in engineering and I love puzzles, so it was inevitable.

Everyone knows that if you're putting a puzzle together, you start with the outside pieces and work your way to the middle. Any pieces that have a flat edge is clearly the outter perimeter pieces. So, theoretically you could potentially build an all white puzzle, quicker than trying to compare all the pieces together

What an absolute legend. He could have easily put in those missing pieces at the end and not shown it on camera. But he didn't. Honest RU-vidrs like this are so rare. Thank you Shane!

Anyone that knows anything about automation knows how ridiculously hard of a challenge this is. Your projects are all so intense dude, love it!!

“I’m slowly going totally insane” is what the top monitor said I am to 😂

I was blown away impressed at the problem solving skill to even figure out how to effectively quantify each point on the edges! You’re awesome bro! You’re living the dream and I’m happy to just watch!

Loved how you were like "Luckily, I only have to do this 1 time" "2 times" "3 times" . Video was fantastic! I love your content!

Honestly, reducing expectations and being able to accept "good enough" is an incredibly powerful and important skill for an engineer to develop. It's not being lazy, it's being efficient with your time.

Do you mind that I absolutely LOVE your wife? You worked so hard on this whole project and she comes in at the end and totally steals the video with one simple question. Awesome!!

6:30 As a software engineer, many people that say stuff like that have no clue about problem solving and just learned a bit of coding on the Internet. Choosing the programming language for a project depends on several factors, and runtime performance is only a small one.

I think we can feel your pain building this robot and having to tone down expectations. Thanks for making this it's amazing.

A lot of people try to mix educational and entertaining, but no one does it quite this way, and rarely this well. The originality and ambition of your projects, the little jokes you have to pay attention to notice... I love this channel.

I want to tell you that as good you are as an engineer you are as an educator! You have an amazing philosophy on the middle ground between hard work and romantic viewpoint. I love how you said that their is something poetic about them two pieces being missing

Couple of suggestions. 1. Try it on a smaller puzzle first. That way you wouldn't have to "only scan 4000 pieces 4 times". 2. Create tests for your code. 3. Instead of abrading the pieces and rescanning and creating your own and rescanning you could have removed noise programmatically which would make it better able to handle real puzzles.

The story being told on the third monitor is a nice touch. At first I was like "Why does that screen just say 'I'm'?" but then it slowly made sense and kept getting better

I know you are slowly going totally insane but as much anticipation and excitement that I've had awaiting this second part must be immeasurable to the feelings you've had for this project. With relocating on top of the emotional and physical -torment- tribulations, you still completed it. Congratulations, and thank you for putting in the hard work (and fun little details).

Here are the simple rules for solving a puzzle more quickly: Start by sorting the pieces. Look for edge pieces and corner pieces. Once you have sorted out all of those, resort the edge pieces into categories based on whether or not each of the three non-flat sides are "tab" or "socket" or "other" which is any uncommon shape. So those side pieces are subdivided into 27 categories. You can now build the frame fairly quickly by knowing which category pieces match what you are looking for right now. Of course you sorted all the pieces into these categories. With the frame complete, now start sorting all the rest of the pieces into shape categories, but on all four sides. Now you still have a lot of pieces to sort through but at least you can limit your search to only those pieces that are in the categories that fit what you are currently looking for.

This is a puzzle I would 100% frame and hang it on the wall! The missing pieces, the effort that went into completing it the parts with the little missing spots... man it's truly a piece of art!

That assembly time lapse was so satisfying

I don't normally write comments but the amount of effort you put in for something any other person would think insane or give up after a day really shows how far humanity can go when pushed all limits away through mere patience

People like you are rare. This is really cool. Your intelligence, ambition, creativity, and dedication make for amazing content and amazing creations!!

Hey Shane! Programmer here! What are the odds you could upload all the images of the pieces and their right sorting for a nice coding challenge? :)

I've been a coder for over 35 years, and this is the most perfect visualization of the iterative process of software problem defining, solving, experimenting, building, testing, rebuilding, retesting. Great work.

I love that on his top monitor it says word by word “I’m slowly going totally insane” I think it’s neat that he took the time to do that and never say anything about it

Huh. Love the fact that it's this guy's own coding/work. Bravo.

What a legend. Tackled hurdles one by one and kept persevering. Great inspiration!

The only RU-vid channel I immediately play when a new video comes out. Absolutely insane discipline and commitment. Always motivates me to keep up my own learning.

I love it. The "I'm slow going totally insane" spelled out in different fonts whenever there was a shot of you speaking at the computer. Thank you for going through 32 hours of taking pictures for the project

By far my new favorite channel… the topics are so abstract and I love it

@14:33 "top vacation destinations with NO robots" omg cracked me up lmao keep up the content amazing stuff

Congratulations on the 3998 piece puzzle assembly! Seriously impressed.

i felt real pain watching you paint over that wall mural. that was my favorite project so far

Puget Systems: "So what kind of specs are you looking for?" Shane: "All of them."

Just stumbled on this channel. Thoroughly enjoyed listening to a guy who's clearly very smart AND entertaining. A happy new subscriber.

Not only could a TV show never be able to produce a segment like this, it would never be as good. this is peak youtube. you took months and months to make a single segment, and its amazing

God this video resonated so hard with me lol. I'm an engineer and I've run in to this same wall of "well fuck this is going to take a long time to solve let's change the scope". It's not a cop out. Sometimes it's reality. Showing the struggles and the copes along the way really gives weight to this problem beyond what most videos could ever possibly do.

It's stuff like this that makes me think we are still a long way from robots taking over. They still require so much human intervention, let alone needing to be made by humans, who are imperfect to begin with. Great video.

please make a part 3, in which you give the robot the ability to scan the pieces by itself and solve the puzzle without help. leaving it like that is so unsatisfying.

You can tell how hard this one must have been compared to the other projects he's done (which all seem very hard as well) because he cut so many corners and just accepted it.

considering how perfect every single of of his projects turn out - i think this shows how unbelievably difficult this project must have been

The moving of the "expectations" meter stick on this project was wild. Initial prospal: A robot to solve any puzzle faster than a human. A robot to solve a 5000 piece all white puzzle. A handfed* for 8 hours robot to solve a 5000 piece all white puzzle. A handfed* for 8 hours robot to solve a 4000* piece all white puzzle. A handfed* for 8 hours robot to solve a modified* 4000* piece all white puzzle. A handfed* for 8 hours robot to solve a custom made* modified* 4000* piece all white puzzle. A handfed* for 8 hours robot to solve a specific* custom made* modified* 4000* piece all white puzzle with human assistance to place the last few pieces*. Final reality: A handfed* for 8 hours robot to solve a specific* custom made* modified* 4000* piece all white puzzle with human assistance to place the last few pieces* and line up all the pieces correctly* and adjust any pieces that are erroneously stacked* This video is an undergraduate in Engineering in a nutshell.

I like how I don't understand a 60% of what he's saying and yet this is still fascinating and entertaining somehow. Oh and btw Danny Postma stole your If at first you don't succeed quote on Twitter XD.

I am a programmer thinking "this guy does such cool stuff" as he says "you should consider becoming a programmer". I laughed out loud at that moment 😅

I'm more exhausted watching this than I am every time I solve a solid color puzzle.

Guessing the edge bug is due to the lack of neighbors to compare with so it ends up being valid by omission

Why didn't you try the algorithm first with only 2 parts, you already know they fit and scaled it up on the whole puzzle once it works? Congrats on the great project.

You did an amazing puzzle assistant. Much better than a boring puzzle solver who can make it all alone and without knowing the power of friendship

Retired programmer here (~40 years). Very impressive work. My work was not in machine control but in information analysis (scheduling, decision making etc.). I get the idea that you expressed about the destination is the journey. I have written several programs just because I wanted to know if I could do it. I'm nerdy that way. Wife's response was priceless.

While am waiting for the next video am here watching all the old ones.... I still cant skip any part of video....

Honestly, I can’t understand how someone this smart would not test each step on a small scale before committing the whole puzzle to it. UNLESS he’s just leveraging big failures for entertainment purposes.

"I'm slowly going totally insane" Well, i think i would too if i spend months on a hard project. Mad respect for your content

I’ve always been genuinely curious if you happen to be an exceptionally talented engineer or if a lot of engineers are as talented as you are but just aren’t as good at making RU-vid videos about their engineering. All the stuff you make is absolutely incredible and your content is super entertaining, keep it up man!

“Packed tighter than a neutrino star” 😂, also the monitor saying “I’m slowly going totally insane” is also awesome. Such an awesome project and video, thank you!

What I like about you is you aren't afraid to admit your mistakes. You actually embrace them and let people know what went wrong or why things didn't work. Some people out there pretend they are so smart and get everything perfect on the first try everytime. Thanks for being real

Gotta love the absolute gems he drops in on his computer screen in the background.

Thanks for this video, I stopped working on a video game that required rng mapping and "puzzle fitting" of the generated tiles because of how difficult the algorithm was, this has inspired me to pick it up again.

Thanks for the great videos! I don't think the average person realizes the endless try, try again that goes into the simplest of items we use each day. When you compare these to things as complex as a cell phone or satellite, it can be almost incomprehensible to some.

Somehow this is both the funniest and most educational channel I watch on the regular. "That takes about eight hours, so I'm glad I only have to do it [number] times!" had me cracking up harder each time

Videos like this make me realize just how amazing the human mind is at solving problems.

I am flabbergasted that a builder like you didn't build his own machine.

It’s mind blowing that there are people out there who’s brains can put things like this together naturally.

"I'm slowly going totally insane" 😅 What I really love about your videos are your careful explanations of your thought process in solving problems. Your channel isn't a project building channel but a problem solving one ❤️ I look forward to future problems you'll solve!

I had a teacher tell me perfection is the enemy of good enough. And although some times perfection is absolutely required I think this is a perfect example of where that saying fits perfectly. You’ve done an excellent job showing how to tackle some challenging programming problems, while also showing the challenges that come along with writing code.

This is such a great project, thanks for putting in the work.

My expectations: "I need to take a picture of every piece one at a time - thankfully I only need to do this once" machine: "error reading photo - please re-scan piece 2935" I guess my expectations got reduced :(

I’d watch 3 hour long videos just talking about the process! Love these videos!!!

This is the ONLY channel for which I have notifications turned on! I love your amazing work, dedication, problem-solving, and eventual success! You do amazing things, bro!

A stunning video. I love the battle between science and the in the moment engineering that actually moves the project forward like the seating of the pieces manually: clearly the concept is proved, and so this small conceit is forgiven, to be solved later, and we satisfy everyone but the wife, which is pretty much an A+. This is the first video of yours I've seen, but I'm looking forward to more. Thanks!

Haven’t seen you for a while so hope everything is fine. I really love this channel

This is one of your best episodes. Not only for the engineering project, but also for adding some philosophy / poetry perls like: "If at first you don't succeed, reduce your expectations until you're a success" or "There is something poetic on two pieces missing".

"Hey welcome to my new workshop.Its packed more than a neutron star".

You pure grit and dedication to a problem is so admirable. Cheers bro!

5 months since the last video you know the next one is about to be crazy