With that in mind I came up with a schema where a line of 13 jewels is formed. You start with the following configuration:

Exchange the two jewels indicated by the arrows and you’re off! That gems cascade into this pattern:

Which then fall into this formation:

And at this point it’s obvious the green and yellow gems will disappear leaving a row of 13 red gems. The key to this step was creating the staggered columns of yellow and green gems to keep the red gems from forming a contiguous line during this middle step.

Now, I would not be surprised if this basic method could be extended to create longer sequences. However, is there an upper bound or is there no limit to the length of a gem row? Since there is a finite number of gem colors I forsee some problems with later iterations with unintended contiguous sequences.

Any mathgeeks out there wanna tackle this?

You want to download the original image, so if you’re in Flickr you click on the “all sizes” button and then this is the link you want to look for:

Now, open that image with Preview (if you’re on a Mac… I’m sure there’s a Windows equiv.) You don’t need to do anything special; just double click on the photo you downloaded.

Use the Inspector to get the location info.

Click on the GPS tab:

Now, when you click on that big “Locate” button, magic happens! You are taken straight to Google maps:

Oh, would you look at that? A street view link!

Here’s the Flickr page of the original photo. Try it yourself!