Anyone who has tried to build a piece of furniture from scratch knows the frustration of painstakingly cutting pieces of wood, only to discover that they won't fit together because the cutting was not quite accurate enough.

That's exactly what happened to Alec Rivers, a Ph.D. student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), when he attempted to build a simple picture frame using woodworking equipment he had inherited from his grandfather. Despite measuring and aligning his tools as best he could by hand, Rivers found that he could not produce shapes with enough precision to make them all fit together. "I was getting incredibly frustrated, because, just as with any home project, I would cut things out and they would look about right, but none of the pieces would line up," Rivers says.

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