Observations on all your questions answered

The London Underground is carrying an advert for AQA - Any Question Answered. The way it works is simple. You key a question into your mobile phone, text it to 63336, and within minutes (and for the modest sum of £1) AQA will text you back the answer.

This has obvious practical uses in pub quizzes and so on, but it is a bold claim. Revealing which west London pubs have gardens or what tomorrow's weather will be like (two examples listed in AQA's ad) is all very well, but what about those questions to which you can't get the answers just from a quick search on Google?

I have tested AQA with a steady stream of questions, from the relatively unchallenging "Which way up do watermelons grow?" to "What is the difference between ethics and morality?". I have tried joke queries - "Why did kamikaze pilots wear crash helmets?" - and questions that might require specialist knowledge: "What is the message of Thus Spake Zarathustra?", for example.

I can report that AQA hasn't let me down yet. Watermelons, I now know, grow on vines that send runners along the ground. The terms "ethics" and "morality" are used interchangeably, but morality refers to moral standards and conduct, while ethics is the study of those things. The message of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra is that, if a man can throw off the shackles of religion, he can attain the status of a superman. And "kamikaze pilots wore helmets in case they crashed before they got to their target; this way they can live and . . . well, die another day" - an answer which suggests the service can show genuine wit.

If I had extended my inquiries to, say, particle physics, AQA might have failed. Apart from the size of my phone bill, there were two reasons why I didn't. First, I felt that bombarding AQA with deliberately tricky questions was somehow not playing the game. AQA charges an impressively small amount per question: the minimum charge for the equivalent service on Google is about $2.50 (£1.40). Presumably, AQA expects to make a loss answering a few tricky questions while making a profit on the majority: the easy ones. Tilting the ratio too far towards difficulty, I feared, would ruin AQA.

Second, and more importantly, I didn't want AQA to fail. In my mind's eye, the company's offices contained old-fashioned desks, where scholars sat, patiently framing their responses. The prosaic reality - that most of the answers are not even written individually, but generated by computer algorithm - was something I did not want to consider.

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