Can you really rely on an app to do your maths homework?
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Version 0 of 1. 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 – has been passed around online both by people lamenting the downfall of education and students gleefully ready to automate their homework. It 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 eventually found some classic arithmetic addition problems, and PhotoMath solved them all with ease. The basic The textbook in the video is a high school algebra text book from the US. So I opened the closest equivalent 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. OK, maybe it was insulted by how easy they were. So 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. The impossible I gave the app one last chance and fed it one of the greatest unsolved equations in mathematics: the Riemann zeta function. If PhotoMath somehow spat out an answer to the related Riemann hypothesis about the solutions to this zeta function, I would have cracked a centuries-old problem, and won a million-dollar bounty and eternal maths fame. It didn’t. It covered the zeta function in the small alignment dots which show that it really is trying hard, but nothing came out. I pointed it at some specific values of the zeta function to try warming it up first, but still no good. It didn’t even add the fractions together. 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. |