Jigsaw solver

[Tim Churches]

mensanator at aol.com wrote:

>bearophileHUGS at lycos.com wrote:
>  
>
>>This can be interesting:
>>http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/03/01/2340238.shtml
>>
>>Bearophile
>>    
>>
>
>Hey, that DataGlyph demo works pretty neat.
>  
>
...

>Of course, being an old System Test Engineer whose job it
>was to figure out how to break software, I couldn't let
>this challenge go unanswered.
>
>So, picking up the gauntlet, I broke it in 5 seconds.
>  
>
...

>Naturally, the real answer is none of the above.
>
>And the damage can be undone in 5 seconds also.
>
>And, under the right circumstances, an undamaged
>DataGlyph could suffer the same fate (which also implies
>that the damaged DataGlyph could be read under the
>same circumstances).
>
>ObPuzzle: how did I "damage" the image?
>  
>
You created a mirror image.

The system can be made resistant to that problem by only allowing 
palindromic messages to be encoded, such as "Madam I am Adam.", 'Able 
was I ere I saw Elba." and "Named under a ban, a bared nude man."

Seriously, I am surprised that the Xerox demo does not try flipping the 
image around various axes. It would be trivial to add these  
transformations. Well, trivial to flip images along a few, obvious axes, 
but not along every possible axis.

What I want to know is whether any open source implementations of this 
technology are available. No doubt it is patented to death by Xerox.

Tim C