The Puzzle Is Complete
May 25, 2025
You find 1,499 pieces of a 1,500-piece puzzle. Is the puzzle complete?
A hole occupies the place where the final piece would go. Alas, the piece itself cannot be found. The cat probably took it. See Photo 1, below.
Photo 1: A puzzle with one piece missing
The question is worth repeating: is the puzzle complete?
Well, it depends on who is asking. We writers of code for programmable devices would probably say, Yes, it is complete,
for the following reasons.
A computer program is complete when it fully specifies what we want the computer to do. We may run tests to satisfy ourselves that all goes as expected. However, by definition code that passes our tests was complete before we performed the tests.
What about this puzzle? Your friendly, neighborhood Code Diarist will claim it is complete because we have fully specified the final piece. We know its position, shape and size. We can say with high confidence what its color, tone and texture ought to be. An AI computer would find enough information in Photo 2, below, to print out a nicely detailed and fully plausible image for the top of the piece.
Photo 2: We can make a piece to fill this hole.
We looked high and low for that missing piece. Perhaps it will reappear some fine, future day. Most everything the cat causes to disappear does eventually come back to us. It will probably turn up in the vacuum cleaner. The piece, I mean; not the cat.
When we find the blessed thing, we might even hunt around for the box and toss the truant back in there with the other 1,499. Will the puzzle be more complete when it has all 1,500 of its pieces rattling loosely inside a box, compared to having 1,499 assembled plus one fully specified on the table?
From the Code Writer perspective I say it is more complete on the table because, on the table, we find where every piece goes and we can see what every piece looks like.
Solving the puzzle in this sense satisfies me. I might be happier having all 1,500 pieces on the table. Yet, in this life, satisfaction is often the best we can get and we may choose to allow it to be enough.