Doctoral student creates algorithm to locate Where’s Wally in shortest time possible

HAVE you ever spent hours aimlessly searching for Where’s Wally? If so, a researcher has found a solution for you.

EventId1ECD82ED-E51D-4C94-A85E-DF96797C6DC2 Where's wally iphone app

WHAT do you do when you are trapped at home by a snowstorm?

Develop an algorithm to find Where’s Wally more efficiently, of course.

Michigan State University’s High-Performance Computing Centre doctoral student Randy Olson recently achieved this bizarre accomplishment.

After tracking down the coordinate positions of all 68 Wally locations from the seven primary editions of the books, he was able to apply a genetic algorithm to find the statistically fastest search pattern.

“Genetic algorithms continually tinker with the solution — always trying something slightly different from the current best solution and keeping the better one — until they can’t find a better solution anymore,” Olson wrote on his blog.

Before running the algorithm, Olson was able to determine Wally was almost never hidden in the top left corner of the page because that’s where the postcard is positioned and he was never in the bottom right as that’s where readers first look when turning pages of the book.

It only took five minutes before the algorithm was able to determine a method to save children of the future many, many hours of searching aimlessly for the character.

Optimal search path for finding Waldo, optimized w/ a GA. #dataviz #datascience Source: http://t.co/LfUavPB4yC pic.twitter.com/itHuaf44Ir

— Randy Olson (@randal_olson) February 3, 2015

The theory encourages readers to start from the bottom left page before shifting their gaze to upper quarter of the opposite page and if he is still not found, people should check bottom half of right page.

“This path represents one of the shortest possible paths to follow on the page to find Wally, so if we followed this path exactly, we’d most likely find Wally much faster than someone following a more basic technique,” said Olson.