4 ms·

Find Waldo Faster

56 points by bootload 11y ago

dvt 11y ago
For those of you that don't know, this article is (probably?) indebted to the 2011 SO question How do I find Waldo with Mathematica?[1]. It was a pretty big deal at the time and I find it odd that the Wolfram article doesn't mention it anywhere (unless I missed it; I just skimmed the blog post). [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-waldo-with-mathematica http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-wal...
- bootload 11y ago
  Good point No mention that I can find of this SO post except by Randy Olson 5 months ago: http://www.randalolson.com/2015/02/03/heres-waldo-computing-the-optimal-search-strategy-for-finding-waldo/#comment-1836662854 http://www.randalolson.com/2015/02/03/heres-waldo-computing-...
justonepost 11y ago
Sounds like a fun deep learning project.
tychobrailleur 11y ago
“...who sat for three hours in a Barnes & Noble bookstore with a measuring tape painstakingly constructing this fabulous dataset.” Wow, couldn’t actually buy the books?!
- bambax 11y ago
  Seconded.
tdicola 11y ago
I've always wanted to train a little neural net image classifier to find Waldo's face. It seems like that would be a more useful general approach to finding Waldo in any image. However it would break down on the last Waldo challenge in one of the books where you have to find Waldo in a world of Waldo lookalikes based only on the fact the real Waldo is missing a shoe.
thescrewdriver 11y ago
Some trivia: In the rest of the English speaking world (including the UK where the series of books originates from) the series is known as Where's Wally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Wally%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Wally%3F
- lamby 11y ago
  Replying here to keep all the trivia in one place, but here's a spoof Werner Herzog short "documentary" on Where's Waldo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvWh6PMi9Ek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvWh6PMi9Ek
- charriu 11y ago
  And "Wo ist Walter" in german :)
- Khao 11y ago
  In French it's called "Où est Charlie?"

56 points by bootload 11y ago

dvt 11y ago

For those of you that don't know, this article is (probably?) indebted to the 2011 SO question How do I find Waldo with Mathematica?[1]. It was a pretty big deal at the time and I find it odd that the Wolfram article doesn't mention it anywhere (unless I missed it; I just skimmed the blog post). [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-waldo-with-mathematica http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-wal...

bootload 11y ago
Good point No mention that I can find of this SO post except by Randy Olson 5 months ago: http://www.randalolson.com/2015/02/03/heres-waldo-computing-the-optimal-search-strategy-for-finding-waldo/#comment-1836662854 http://www.randalolson.com/2015/02/03/heres-waldo-computing-...

justonepost 11y ago

Sounds like a fun deep learning project.

tychobrailleur 11y ago

“...who sat for three hours in a Barnes & Noble bookstore with a measuring tape painstakingly constructing this fabulous dataset.” Wow, couldn’t actually buy the books?!

bambax 11y ago
Seconded.

tdicola 11y ago

I've always wanted to train a little neural net image classifier to find Waldo's face. It seems like that would be a more useful general approach to finding Waldo in any image. However it would break down on the last Waldo challenge in one of the books where you have to find Waldo in a world of Waldo lookalikes based only on the fact the real Waldo is missing a shoe.

thescrewdriver 11y ago

Some trivia: In the rest of the English speaking world (including the UK where the series of books originates from) the series is known as Where's Wally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Wally%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Wally%3F

lamby 11y ago
Replying here to keep all the trivia in one place, but here's a spoof Werner Herzog short "documentary" on Where's Waldo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvWh6PMi9Ek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvWh6PMi9Ek
charriu 11y ago
And "Wo ist Walter" in german :)
Khao 11y ago
In French it's called "Où est Charlie?"