

Find Waldo Faster - bootload
http://blog.wolfram.com/2015/02/27/find-waldo-faster/

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dvt
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-
wal...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-waldo-with-
mathematica)

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bootload
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-...](http://www.randalolson.com/2015/02/03/heres-waldo-computing-
the-optimal-search-strategy-for-finding-waldo/#comment-1836662854)

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tychobrailleur
“...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?!

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bambax
Seconded.

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tdicola
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.

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thescrewdriver
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)

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lamby
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)

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justonepost
Sounds like a fun deep learning project.

