Is it a good thing or a bad thing that Google has created a cellphone application that will solve any Sudoku puzzle?
Google Goggles, as it’s called, uses a phone’s camera to take a snap of the puzzle. It sends the grid of boxes to Google’s central servers, where the numbers are effortlessly filled in, and a picture of the result is sent back to the phone’s owner.
Simple. And, obviously, marvellous for the puzzle aficionado. Or is it? When the news was splashed on the front page of a national British newspaper last week, the article began: “The days of Sudoku could be numbered, thanks to Google…”
The paper’s puzzles editor shook his head and called it a sad day for puzzle fans, as if they would henceforth have no choice but to use the app rather than employ their own ingenuity and logic to solve Sudokus.
Not everyone despaired. Puzzle fans pointed out that many problem-solving websites already existed, and didn’t affect the enjoyment of the diehard conundrophile.
“Saying that computers spoil the pleasure of Sudoku solving,” wrote one blogger, Paul Stephens, “is like saying that helicopters spoil the pleasure of mountaineering.”
The next day, Google was at it again. It announced another new app, Google Translate. Using it, a cellphone can translate a conversation – in any of 50 languages – while it’s in progress.
Minutes later, it announced that it had now added Latin to the syllabus of languages, and could provide instantaneous translation of chunks of text.
But who would benefit from such a refinement? Google cannily explained that it would enable web users “to read many of the crucial philosophical and scientific texts originally written in this language”.
Yeah, right, as the children used to say. The number of academic scholars looking up scientific treatises in Latin online will be a drop in the ocean compared with the thousands of bored schoolkids who will use the app to translate their homework in seconds.
The new Google features are just two more examples of a modern phenomenon: computer-enabled cheating.
Pub quiz cheats have long benefited from the smartphone’s capacity to tell you (under the table) which horse won the Derby in 1959 or which Marianne Faithfull song featured in Thelma & Louise. And there are any number of online cheat services for crossword fans with limited patience.
But I’m concerned about a more subtle and sneaking malaise. It’s not like cheating at cards with a concealed ace, or sneaking a crib into an exam. It’s a matter of cheating yourself.
It’s about yielding to the weakness that’s in us all, to find an answer to a question or a solution to a problem in the shortest possible time, and to delegate the struggle to a machine.
Of course, Sudoku wranglers can complete a puzzle without looking for the solution online. But if they get stuck halfway through a real stormer of a puzzle, when they’ve been racking their brains for 20 minutes, you just know that they’ll reach for the easy way out. And they will miss out on what Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult”.
A version of the phenomenon could be found several years ago, among the fans of Nemo’s Almanac, an annual literary competition that has been going for 120 years.
The almanac is a booklet of 12 pages, one for each month of the year, on each of which are six anonymous quotations. Contestants must identify from which novel, play, poem, autobiography, essay or letter collection the quotations come, to win a modest prize.
They have a year to track them down. Long-term Nemaniacs (as they’re known) will tell you how fiendishly difficult it is. You need a well-stocked memory, a comprehensive library, and access to many others.
Three months into your research (which involves consulting bookish friends, like a cop with a “missing persons” snapshot in their hand), you’ll be tearing your hair out. Some players get in touch with each other and play swops – “I’ve tracked down October 4 and will swop it for anything you’ve found in April” – but few ever get full marks.
Google changed everything. Not only could you identify two-dozen quotations by pressing a button, in 1998, CD-ROMs containing the whole canon of English letters were suddenly available.
Forget the months spent in libraries, the tantalisation, the slow-cooked satisfaction of finding out.
“A year from now,” the almanac’s then editor, Alan Hollinghurst, glumly predicted, “half the almanac will be solvable in 10 minutes.” He urged contestants to adopt a policy of “circumspect inaction”, something akin to urging a heroin addict to ignore the phial of methadone an arm’s length away.
Sometimes not knowing the answer is a blessed state. Remember how crestfallen readers of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were when the supercomputer Deep Thought, asked to find the “Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”, concluded (after 7.5 million years) that the answer was “42”.
The Ultimate Question was, of course, “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?” from Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind.
If the Translate app can turn your conversation into French or Greek or Maori at the drop of a finger, why bother to learn a foreign language? If Google can fill in the empty boxes in your Sudoku puzzle, why waste more than five minutes on it?
A friend who worried about her daughter’s scholastic progress was surprised to find that the child’s teacher routinely returned her homework without drawing attention to the fact that she’d spelt a dozen words incorrectly.
“It’s perfectly okay,” the teacher said when they met. “I’ve shown Kate how to use Spellcheck.” – The Independent