
Sudoku Magic allows you to take a photo of sudoku on iPhone and it solves it - pclark
http://www.magicsolver.com/?page_id=44
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noonespecial
Lightweight augmented reality like this is going to be much more of a game
changer than most people think. Today its just a toy that figures out whats
missing in your sudoku, soon it will help you figure out whats wrong with your
car, or where that bus is going, or whats in that hamburger.

I'd kill for an app thats linked to octopart so I can point my iphone at a
circuit board and little bubbles appear telling me what all of the parts are
and how to order replacements... pls make, kthnx.

~~~
nsrivast
I'd like to point at a plant or animal and know the species.

~~~
noonespecial
If they can figure it out in time, it opens a whole new realm of search for
Google. Point and search will be huge. If not, those 2 guys eating the ramen
and dreaming big will surely bring it to us post-haste.

~~~
oliverlamming
We actually met some people doing something like this in Cambridge when
MagicSolver was just starting - a group called imense
(<http://www.imense.com/>). They have an automated picture tagger. You give it
a picture of a field of sunflowers, for example, and it comes up with
'flowers, nature, field, ...'. I imagine that if you made it domain-specific
(your PCB example), you might be able to actually classify the objects.

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noonespecial
I'm thinking that over the next 5 years, the simple act of giving every geek a
powerful, programmable computer with a camera attached (that fits in their
pocket) is going to do more for computer vision than all of the years of
research that came before.

~~~
oliverlamming
I certainly hope so. We got taught by John Daugman, who's done some amazing
stuff in Computer Vision. It's brilliant for us to be able to do something
like Sudoku Magic in a mobile phone. And we have plenty more ideas to come!

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tomusher
Sudoku Grab (<http://sudokugrab.blogspot.com/>) has been doing this for a
while - I'm not sure how Sudoku Magic compares.

~~~
rahulvohra
Sudoku Magic is similar to Sudoku Grab, but we improve on the two main use
cases:

1\. Playing Sudoku. We want to give players a better Sudoku experience. Simple
things like tactile sounds and highlighting the current row, column and square
make people happy. (The aesthetic still has a long way to go though.)

2\. Showing off. People mostly use our application to amaze their friends.
That's why we show as-it-happens images of the vision algorithms. We're still
finding ways to make it cooler. Any suggestions would be much appreciated :)

We actually got this working in J2ME back in 2005. We were negotiating a
distribution deal with a handset manufacturer, but the discussion slowly went
nowhere. They wanted it on a wider range of handsets than was feasible, as
camera access on various handsets was significantly broken. For example,
checkout [http://www.scribd.com/doc/17740520/Samsung-Z-Series-
Handsets...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/17740520/Samsung-Z-Series-Handsets-
Capture)

\- In the Z140, asking for a 640x480 image gave you a 320x240 image, squashed
and repeated twice.

\- In the Z540V, asking for a 320x240 image gave you an image which was green
and skewed!

Thank god for platform homogeneity.

~~~
gizmo
At the moment it doesn't look like you show -how- the solver solves the
problem. Showing how your solver works, by visualizing backtracking / guesses
it makes, would be really cool.

~~~
rahulvohra
Good point and good idea :)

~~~
pclark
couldn't one argue that if you see _what_ its doing - it isn't magic? it's
quite clear what its doing, and that isn't magical.

if its just a black box and it comes up with the solution - thats magic.

~~~
oliverlamming
I do seem to remember a Pratchett quote that conjurers amaze you twice - once
with the trick and once with the trickery.

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tocomment
I want to make an app where you can take a picture of a resistor and it tells
you the value by reading the colored bands. It would be really cool, but I'm
not sure where to start. I really need a book on computer vision.

~~~
jodrellblank
_I'm not sure where to start_

    
    
      There's an app for that!
    
    
    

(you could Google for some resistor pictures and play around in your favourite
photoshop clone, then get an image processing library for your favourite
language).

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_giu
it also gives you the possibility to play the photographed sudoku on the
iphone. reading the headline, I tought the app only solves a photographed
sudoku, which per se is not very useful (except you want to impress your
friends). it's a pretty cool app. I recommend you to watch the video
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO8QjTZkcmw>)

~~~
oliverlamming
If you like the look of it, you can find the app itself at:
[http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...](http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=322457381&mt=8)

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jrnkntl
Reminds me of CubeCheater (<http://cubecheater.efaller.com/>) Photograph all
sides of a Rubick's Cube and it shows you step by step instructions to solve
that particular cube. Pretty cool.

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leonpalm
Some differences between Grab and Magic:

\- Magic also has a very powerful playing interface - big numpad buttons for
two-humbed play, undo/redo, a nice pencil mode(the numpad buttons even change
colour depending on which numbers have been pencilled in), movable highlights
for the current box, row and column. It is actually better than most playing
UI's, even for dedicated sudoku playing apps. Grab's playing UI is a bit
simpler.

\- Grab has skins for the playing UI (you can change colour schemes) and an
animated main menu.

\- Magic scores the puzzle for you when you capture (e.g. 4832 - hard), which
is cool if you want to beat your personal best. As a bonus, the checking
screen (where you can fix digits) doubles as a puzzle editor/creator. You can
add/remove numbers and see how the difficulty score compares in real-time. It
also tells you if the puzzle is unsolvable (e.g. due to multiple or invalid
solutions) :-)

\- The capture process for Magic looks much nicer (a spinning cube + music
rather than a progress bar) and seems more reliable but you can't adjust the
grid boundaries.

\- You can contact the developers from the main menu in Magic

~~~
iamflimflam1
I'm actually working on an automatic grader for captured puzzles right now -
this will use the same logic techniques that a human solver would use so
should give a real indication of how tough a puzzle actually is.

~~~
leonpalm
That's exactly what Sudoku Magic does (same for puzzle generation in order for
them to be fun). From naked singles to X-Fish, it uses them all :-)

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icefox
In a similar vein I want a puzzle solver where you take a photo of the box and
the piece and the app highlights where the piece probably goes in the picture

[http://ideasfrommydreams.blogspot.com/2009/04/iphone-
apps.ht...](http://ideasfrommydreams.blogspot.com/2009/04/iphone-apps.html)

~~~
oliverlamming
That might be doable. One of my fellow students designed a jigsaw puzzle
solver that worked by looking at the shape of the piece, rather than a
picture. However, I have worked in this kind of area and if you can guarantee
little rotation, working out the translational offset isn't too bad. I'll give
this some thought.

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ManuSudoku
Sudoku Magic could be a great app to open a conversation with a top girl on
the Tube! If a top babe is playing Sudoku on her newspaper, you can help her
to solve her puzzle with your iPhone ;-))

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steamboiler
And the world takes the first step towards a working Tricorder.

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thomasfl
No futurist could have imagined sudoko magic just three years ago. Game
changers, like augmented reality, is really great for entrepreneurs.

~~~
jodrellblank
"We actually got this working in J2ME back in 2005" - RahulVohra, a few
comments up this page.

