Slashdot Mirror
Google Goggles Solves Sudoku
mikejuk writes "Ever been frustrated when you can't solve a Sudoku? Well, now there's an app for that. It is just one more capability in the latest version of Google Goggles. All you have to do is point your phone's camera at a Sudoku puzzle, take a snapshot, and pattern recognition and a bit of game logic sorts out the answer. Have you ever had the feeling that AI is getting to be just a little too commonplace?"
The developer of Sudoku Grab for the iPhone - which solves Sudokus via the camera - has a blog post explaining how he did this (in June 2009.)
http://sudokugrab.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-does-it-all-work.html
OK, it's cool technology, but this is almost as pointless as Homer Simpson's book of already-solved crossword puzzles.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
i had a meeting with my boss today and he gave me a list of new requirements for extending the inhouse app. i pointed my cell phone at my notes from the meeting, it snapped a picture of my poor handwriting and the list of new requirements, i sent the picture to google goggles, i went to lunch, and when i came back google goggles was busy writing jquery code and extending the xslt transforms we use. i may even get a raise. thanks google goggles
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What AI though? Sudoku is pattern recongintion. It doesn't take an AI to solve one. There is more processing spent on image analysis than actual problem solving.
When I think AI I think of some that can create on it's own. Not learn, not solve but create.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Something makes me think that you don't really believe the quote in your signature.
which is totally what she said
go get your coat and hand in your geek card at the door. The fun is in writing the program that solves the puzzle
It's not even to do with numbers, it's just unique identifiers.
You could do it with animals. 1 = cow, 2 = sheep, so one so forth. I like to do it with colours, red, blue, yellow, etc. You could do it with Letters, ABCD...
There is no addition, subtraction, no real computation done with any of the numbers. The only rules are that there has to be 1 of every 9 symbol in each box and each row, and that rule will enforce the subsets that most other people apply (no two identical symbols in the same row or box).
Holy moley, my unoptimized naive (backtracking) solution written in C would solve the hardest puzzles in under 30 seconds, on my 900mhz netbook no less. What language did you write it in (not trolling here)?
We had a little office competition to see who could write the fastest solver, back when the Sudoku craze kicked off.
I think all our solutions came up with a solution in a fraction of a second; but I don't think any of them would have found all the solutions to a grid which had more than one. Indeed I bet some of the algorithms would have stalled on such a grid -- since one of us limited himself to applying the kind of rules that a human might apply.
(He was able to programmatically classify grids into difficulty levels, by counting how many of the rules were necessary to solve it)
Most people think math means it has to be associated with numbers, but that's not really the case. Numbers just turn out to be a great tool which can be applied to a wide range of mathematical problems. But the problems themselves are often not defined in terms of numbers.
I'd consider Sudoku a math puzzle, even without numbers. You have a set of symbols (and yes, from a mathematical standpoint, your colors are symbols as well) and a set of places (being arranged in a square grid), and the task is to find a mapping from the places to the symbols so that for certain subsets of the set of places (rows, columns, subsquares) each symbol appears exactly once (or to say it more mathematically, for each of those subsets the restriction of the searched-for function to that subset is bijective). It's a well-defined mathematical problem.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.