Robot AI Finds Waldo, Destroys Happiness

Just in case you didn’t have a childhood and haven’t ever visited a doctor’s office, Where’s Waldo? — or Where’s Wally? for you Brits — is a series of puzzle books made for kids. The entire point of the puzzles is to find Waldo, who always wears red and white stripes, in illustrations full of similarly-styled nobodies. Therefore, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that this There’s Waldo robot hates fun, because it uses AI to find Waldo more quickly than you can.

This Waldo-seeking robot was built by creative technologist Matt Reed of the Redpepper creative agency. Reed was inspired to build the hatebot by Amazon Rekognition, which is able to detect celebrity faces with image analysis. If a computer could recognize actors and actresses, surely it could recognize the biggest star of them all. To make that happen, Reed taught Google’s Cloud AutoML to recognize Waldo by training it with a data set composed of pictures found on Google Images.

The robot is equipped with a camera, and a page from Where’s Waldo is placed in view. First, it detects all of the faces in the illustration, then the AI goes to work searching those for what it thinks is Waldo based on the images it was trained on. Once it finds Waldo, it uses a robot arm to point a little rubber hand at it — thereby depriving you of the opportunity to find him yourself. Redpepper says There’s Waldo has been able to point out Waldo in as little as 4.45 seconds, because it thinks it’s better than you and wants to rub it in.