Excellent article. Being a self-taught CSS/HTML/Jquery front-end developer (and SEM Acct. Manager by Day) the nuts and bolts of image recognition were black magic to me. This was a fantastic read.
When you think about it, this is actually totally useless. It is much easier to just generate a puzzle on the fly and not require the user to have a paper copy of it.
But I bought it anyway, because the point isn't to solve Sudoku puzzles, it's to show off how nifty this program is. Which is easily worth a buck.
An app like this could solve the puzzle in your newspaper faster than you could transcribe it. I would love to see more OCR apps which are even more useful. Where's the app to scan a barcode or ISBN of a book and have it populate with the information from Amazon and a link to download the e-book?
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 20.3 ms ] threadBut I bought it anyway, because the point isn't to solve Sudoku puzzles, it's to show off how nifty this program is. Which is easily worth a buck.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/07/amazon-killing-mobile-a...
Serious Sudoku players tend to scorn machine-generated puzzles and regard those build by Sudoku masters as superior. See for example http://www.nikoli.co.jp/en/puzzles/sudoku/hand_made_sudoku.h...
I believe similar arguments are made by crossword fans, though it is easier to understand why in that case.
So I can see the motivation for the application, at least.