When you're doing a jigsaw puzzle, there's this stage where you've done all the easy stuff. and you've got a few little clusters of pieces together, but you also have a big chunk together that you start thinking of as the main chunk.
And you shift your focus to mostly putting the pieces directly into the main chunk (because you've already put together all the little chunks you could sort-out).
You know what I mean? This happens to everyone, not just me, right?
What do we call that stage, folks?
Is there a name already for that and no one told me?
If not, what should we name it?
Maybe the gestalt, because the parts have come together enough to be the puzzle and anchor the puzzling experience?
Google's Gemini AI generically suggests this stage should be called "filling it in," but that makes it sound like we are just pouring the rest of the pieces into a container, and lacks the sense of challenge and excitement and poetry I'm hoping for here.
It's too early to be the end game - in fact, I'd say the end game is when you have so few pieces left you know you're almost done. You might not finish right then, but you know you can finish when you want to.
If you're mostly puzzling as a couple, like we do, but one of you has wandered off, it's considered uncivilized to hit the end game and proceed without first calling out to the other person, "Hey we're in the endgame, shall I wait to finish with you?"
In poker, there's a similar moment called the Turn, it's when the 4th card is laid down visibly (in Texas Hold'em, the most popular style of poker these days). At the Turn the probabilities start to collapse and everything comes into focus.
In mystery novels, there's a similar set of stages: first, just trying to gather all the details, then connecting a few dots, and then at some point that seems most similar, you have a theory and try to resolve the rest of the facts. That's sometimes referred to as the deductive phase, but often the detective is riding on insight and intuition at still.
And that's how it feels to me when you hit that stage of puzzling: all the easy sort-able stuff is done, now you're looking at this full landscape of complex edges and visuals and you just sort-of soak it all in and go "oh i got it!"
So, anyone have a good name for that part of puzzling or like any of the ones above?
I would name it… CHUNKING
Hm, I bet there’s a name for people who like to have a name for everything.
I don’t usually assign words to what my brain deals with in colors and shapes, but I would probably just think of it as “narrowing down possibilities.” Each time you put together another group of pieces that was organized through their color, shape (especially edges), and/or patterns, you narrow down the number of pieces left. 🤷♀️