A jigsaw puzzle is a classic afternoon diversion for one or more people. Variants are now available in 3 dimensions, and of many shapes and sizes. The biggest commercially available puzzle is about 18,000 pieces.

Now try this thought experiment: Consider the added complexity of having hundreds of thousands of pieces, rather than hundreds or thousands, and imagine having hundreds, or even thousands, of different people putting these parts together, with many in different locations. Consider the excitement of contracting separately for collections of these pieces to be produced, rather than having them all laser cut from an original picture. Embrace the notion that in this envisioned world, a puzzle, and it's pieces, might actually have more than 3 dimensions, because the parts interact in many ways besides just visually (and also, in non-obvious ways), due to such things as dynamic properties of the pieces, retained states while they operate, failure modes of individual elements, and intrinsic material properties of the pieces the puzzle is built from.