You can put this one into my stuffed, overflowing “you’re fucking kidding me” file. Shared by my pal Matthew on Google Reader, it turns out that there is an app on the App Store called Sudoku Grab that lets you take a picture of any Sudoku puzzle, anywhere – from books, newspapers, lcd screens – and have it convert it into a usable, software-based Sudoku puzzle on your iPhone. I just tried it by snapping a jpg of a puzzle on my laptop. It works, flawlessly. And it’s not that it simply converts the puzzle into electronic form to save you from having to use an eraser. It’s that it actually ‘understands’ the puzzle and is able to give you hints or, if you wish, just solve it for you. So, um, welcome to the future guys.
(Am I just naive, or is this really effing cool?)
#1 by Nav on July 21, 2009 - 1:43 am
Okay, okay, fine – it’s not really augmented reality. Still – it is the erasure of the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ though. So it’s that sorta’ thing I was going for. Happy now?!
#2 by Melissa on July 21, 2009 - 8:00 am
No, that’s really effing cool. Now if they could only make OCR work as effectively…
#3 by Matthew Gallant on July 21, 2009 - 9:16 am
This application (or more specifically, this post explaining how it works) shows what I really love about programming / computer science. It trains you in a way of thinking that breaks big unwieldy problems (capture and solve Sudoku) into a series of small manageable ones (apply an adaptive threshold, apply a transform, straighten out the image, use simple AI techniques to recognize numbers). The developer was very clever to figure it all out, but it’s still possible to look inside the black box and understand how the process works.
Now if only I could get Delicious Library to work this well…
#4 by Robin on July 21, 2009 - 3:09 pm
Srsly — good point, Matthew. There are two awesome things here happening in parallel.
1. The awesomeness of the trick
2. The awesomeness of the explanation
#5 by Nav on July 21, 2009 - 6:56 pm
Matthew: That’s an interesting way of thinking, one that I wish I could practise more myself. And you’re right – even though I don’t understand the specifics of that post, I get a sense of how it came together using smaller, more comprehensible parts. Neat! Oh and btw, good post on ‘Gaming Made Me’ – I’m working on a response of sorts.