Where’s Wally? Don’t ask robot that finds him in four seconds
AI has “ruined” Where’s Wally, as facial recognition technology means the classic picture puzzle can be solved in just four seconds.
A robot, named There’s Waldo, after the US version of the books, has been trained to recognise Wally by being shown numerous images of his head.
It then uses facial recognition technology to locate Wally’s distinctive red and white striped jumper and hat.
The robot’s arm, which has an inbuilt camera, searches the page to locate Wally in crowds of up to 300 faces. If it feels confident it has found a 95 per cent match it will close in on Wally’s face. The robot then uses its arm to point out the character.
Matt Reed, 41, of Redpepper, a creative agency, trained the robot by uploading about 62 photos of Waldo heads from Google Images.
“I thought that wouldn’t be enough data to build a strong model but it gives surprisingly good predictions on Waldos that weren’t in the original training set,” he said.
Responses to Mr Reed’s creation have been mixed on social media. While some called it the “greatest invention ever” others asked if the crea- tor knew “how many five-year-olds are going to be out of a job because of you?”
Mr Reed, from Nashville, Tennessee, said he wanted to see how much of a “timeless challenge” finding Wally could be. “With all the projects I work on, the purpose is to learn about the latest tech,” he added.