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Shortcuts: Homework: Putting the scan-and-solve maths app to the test(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The video shows a textbook being flipped open and a smartphone pointed at a dense page of calculations. But this isn't someone Instagramming their homework; the phone scans the equations on its screen and solves them, each solution popping up instantly with a satisfying click. The footage - created to promote a new algebra-solving app called PhotoMath - looked too good to be true. As a maths enthusiast with no shortage of equations to solve, I grabbed some algebra books off my shelf and took PhotoMath for a test lap. The easy First, I tried some of the problems in a modern primary school maths book. Faced with worded problems and maths being used in context, the app was helpless. It could not help Choi work out how many birthday cards he had if his family gave him seven and his friends gave him 16. And I don't think Sheena and Grant ever worked out who won their game of darts. But I finally found some classic arithmetic addition problems, and PhotoMath solved them all with ease. The basic I opened the closest equivalent to the high school textbook in the video I own and pointed my phone at Exercise 4.5f, which requests the reader to "solve the following equations". PhotoMath immediately spotted the first equation and promptly gave me . . . the wrong answer. It had picked up the question number as part of the equation. Several false-positives later, it locked-on to the actual question, and gave the correct answer. The hard Determined to put the app through its paces, I opened a university-level book, Number Theory by George E Andrews. Starting slow, I pointed it at some linear Diophantine equations (equations where the solutions are whole numbers). Nothing. Not a click. I flipped to the chapter on arithmetic functions to let it stretch its logs. It excitedly noticed that one of the functions was called "g" but I couldn't convince it to have a guess at any solutions. PhotoMath is happy solving simple algebraic equations and doing basic arithmetic, but not much else. So it seems fairly safe to say that this app is not going to undermine modern maths education, much like calculators didn't a generation previously. If you are capable of downloading and running PhotoMath, knowing how to feed it equations and judging which of its answers are correct, then you could have solved the same problem much quicker the old-fashioned way. Matt Parker (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |