As far as jigsaw puzzles go, it would be interesting to see if there are unique ways to optimize your piece search. There's the edge pieces and sorting by colo

As far as jigsaw puzzles go, it would be interesting to see if there are unique ways to optimize your piece search. There's the edge pieces and sorting by color. I've found that sub-sorting by pegs/holes can dramatically help - I had a "picture made up of pictures" puzzle which allowed me to correctly orient the pieces. Knowing even just two of the required slots, combined with the color, reduced the search to a reasonable brute-force search. Plus, by sorting the pieces you could actually do a brute-force without feeling like you might have missed a piece.