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?"

Re:Sudoku porn

[slim]

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)

Re:Sudokus

[maxwell demon]

Most people think that Sudoku is a math puzzle because its often associated with numbers, but thats not really the case as you can do it with any 9 unique identifiers.

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.