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Finding Wally wasn’t easy as a kid—and it doesn’t get less tough as an adult. No problem: now there’s an algorithm that can find him for you. Let’s not call it cheating, though, OK?
The Waldo challenge (as it’s known in the States) was posted on Stack Overflow, a collaborative programming forum. While plenty of people submitted solutions, one user, called Heike, has been voted the king of Waldo finding. You can read about his solution here—or you could go dig out your old books and have a go yourself. [Stack Overflow via The Verge]
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Wally, not Waldo, obv.
#corrections
3 points
1. from the writers point of view he is correct since he is American and it’s Waldo in the US.
2. Hashtags don’t work here. Best to e-mail sam.gibbs@future.net with corrections.
3. Love your username
1 & 2. My correction wasn’t especially serious, hence the hash tag and I was hoping the UK editors would translate from the US site as they do with currency.
3. Thank you kindly.
Aha, they’ve changed it. Awesome.
I’ve never understood the difference in name. Why have Wally here and Waldo there – why not just call it Where’s Wally everywhere?
I think Wally isn’t really used much as a name in America, so the publishers probably wanted something the locals would connect with.
managed to finnish one in around 5 minutes… Wally clearly isn’t trying hard enough.
It’s not very hard to find Wally, he’s right there in that little circle!
Yeah, this picture is an extract from Where’s Wally – Sun reader edition.
Reminds me of a joke. A Sun reader writes an excited letter to the paper saying “I don’t know why people say Sun readers are thick, I just finished a jigsaw that said 3-4 years on the side of the box and it only took me one”.
Badum-tish
You’re gonna crack your symbol with all these jokes, Darrell.
Took me about 2 minutes to figure out you meant cymbal
I swear my spelling’s gotten worse since chrome spellchecks me…
Gah. It’s slightly annoying seeing such a naive image processing method being upvoted 770 times as the answer.
His solution is way too basic and is not a solution because it will not work for most Where’s Wally images. It works in that one image because Wally happens to be upright, not particularly obscured, and there are no other people wearing wally’s distinctive jumper. In lots of where’s wallys there are a lot of other people with the red and white striped jumper.
His solution would be useful as part of a preprocessing method for a much more sophisticated classifier. That is all.
Spoken like a true programmer. As you say, it is good for what it has been written for (this 1 picture) but not as a general purpose Wally/Waldo finding solution.
“one user, called Heike, has been voted the king of Waldo finding. You can read about his solution here”
Um, Heike is a woman’s name… and seeing how “Heike” has their location set as “The Netherlands,” where Heike is a popular name, I’m inclined to think that Heike is, in fact, a she, not a he.