Have you ever thought about what the ultimate jigsaw puzzle would look like? At a certain level of complexity, puzzles based on static images all seem to become indistinguishably different. Whether it’s a closeup of a plate of baked beans or an image of the cut lines on the back of a jigsaw, recut into a different jigsaw…or whatever.

I hate solving jigsaws only slightly less than watching someone else work on one, but designing the ultimate puzzle is still something I’m thinking about.

Anyway, on a related theme, Rubik’s cube is both mechanically ingenious and a challenging puzzle…two things I greatly admire. I lost interest in it when they started having robots undertake the solution algorithm and it became just a wrist exercise.

There are now versions of the original cube which contain some lights, but today’s invention is to improve on these by fitting each of the square facets with an LED (and no sticky coloured squares). The lighting behaviour would be programmable, so that it would be possible to challenge your smartest friends with a cube algorithm whose target end state was, for example, that in which the lights on the cube faces mirror the colours on the conventional cube.

The difference with this design would be, though, that the lights would be free to switch colours, depending eg on the colours of their neighbours. This could be made fiendishly difficult and keep any computer scientists you know completely absorbed and thus out of trouble when away from their workstations.

Imagine believing that you were one move away from completion, only to have the colours then change, under algorithmic control, on a far-side facet ; )

Railway aerodynamics is thought to be important only for bullet trains.

Slower-moving engines and carriages would also benefit, however, in terms of fuel economy, from a less blunt profile to their rear ends in particular. The trouble is that operational flexibility requires that engines and carriages swap positions within a train: none can rely on always being at the trailing edge.

Today’s invention is an inflatable envelope (similar structurally to a rubber lifeboat).

This would be attached to both ends of every blunt railway vehicle leaving a door-shaped aperture to allow normal traffic between compartments or, in the case of engines, forward vision via the windows.

When not on the end of a train, the envelope would partly occupy the air gap between any two items of rolling stock. On sensing that it was on a last carriage or engine, it would inflate using compressed air and provide that vehicle with a smoothly tapering rear geometry. This would greatly lessen the form drag and therefore the running costs.

A version of this could also be developed to smooth off the running gear which, on most trains, is exposed and anything but streamlined.

Tracking eye movements accurately, without a massive amount of lab equipment in tow, is still not easy*. If you try to do it by finding the irises in a digital image of the face, for example, the processing required to cope with high speed movements of up to 700 degrees per second is phenomenal…doing that with any degree of precision still poses difficulties.

Today’s invention is a direct contact eye tracker. I’ve talked before about using a single optical mouse to crudely detect movements of the eyes. Now imagine taking the sensors from a dozen or so such mice and embedding them circumferentially in a soft, transparent ring which is lightly held in contact with the eyelids by an adapted pair of spectacle frames.

This approach, which relies on low-cost, high-precision technology, could be especially useful for people with insufficient manual dexterity to control a joystick or by advertisers interested in where people look as they walk freely around eg a shopping centre. A two-eyed version could compute vergence, at least at close range, and provide information about what’s being observed in 3-D space.

*Predicting the direction of eye movement precisiely and quickly might be done by sensing electrical signals to the eye muscles (When preparing to make an eye movement for example, a copy of the ‘movements-to-be-made-next’ program (efference copy) is used to predict where, and at what, we will be looking next. We then compare this expectation to what actually happens. It’s thought that any discrepancy gives a measure of the extent to which external influences eg anomalous head movements, have occurred). As far as I know, there is no easy way to do this non-invasively.

I once knew someone who, having made a lucrative deal in an oil town, celebrated by buying himself a 500 horsepower sportscar. He rarely drove it over 50MPH, however, explaining that people couldn’t recognise him in it if he went fast.

Today’s invention attempts to reintroduce personal recognisability into driving.

As each seat is occupied in a car, a small light would shine on its occupant’s face. This would enable travellers in a vehicle to be seen by other road users as individuals, (rather than as the anonymous contents of a car with a fixed personality given to it by some industrial designer).

This being seen would result, I believe, in more responsible road use…people would slow down and be less inclined to road rage if they were appearing in a public space, rather than hiding in the privacy of their own metal carapace.