Sudoku. What a wonderful puzzle game. Calisthenics for the brain. Keeps the ol’ gray matter in fighting trim, yes, it does.
To which Google replies: Pppbbhhhhttt.
In this video, a software engineer from the multi-tentacled Internet behemoth goes head to head with the U.S. Sudoku champion in numeric combat. Actually, the engineer does little more than tap a phone screen a few times. Google Goggles does all the work, solving the puzzle in a few seconds.
This is cheating, right? A direct violation of “don’t be evil”? An invitation to let your brain, which got so buff on Sudoku and crosswords, go fully flacid?
Google Goggles is an app that was launched late last year. Available for iPhones and the Droid OS, it scans an image and feeds it to Google’s search monster, which spits out information about the object.
The app is designed to be especially good with barcodes, book covers, wine labels, business cards and popular landmarks. It doesn’t do well with plants, animals and cars, but you’d better believe the Google drones are working on it.
The Sudoku trick depends on a fact that’s a bigger forehead-slapper than anything we’ve cited thus far: Somewhere in the Interwebs is an image of darn near every Sudoku puzzle in existence. Imagine. All Google does is find the right one.
