Created by British illustrator Martin Handford, Wally has been subtly convincing children everywhere that getting lost is a fun adventure and not irresponsible since 1987. Being neigh-on impossible to find as a minute man among a myriad of similar-looking characters has charmed the world and even led to a short-live animated series. But now the wayward Wally has been tamed, by a man trapped in a snowstorm.
Randal S Olson, a computer science graduate research student at Michigan State University, who decided to turn his gaze on expanding the “foolproof strategy” for finding Wally that Slate devised in 2013 – whereby the position of Wally was charted (68 times) in the seven original books, and revealed he was most likely lost in “one of two 1.5-inch tall bands, one starting three inches from the bottom of the page and another one starting seven inches from the bottom, stretching across the spread.”
Slate's guide to finding Wally [Slate]
That wasn’t accurate enough for Olson, who applied a statistical tool called a kernel density estimation to divine a more accurate metric to finding Wally, or Waldo as he’s know across the pond. From his blog:
- Waldo almost never appears in the top left corner. That’s because there was always some postcard from Waldo in the top left corner describing the setting and some interesting facts about it.
- Waldo is rarely located on the edges. Slate’s Ben Blatt hypothesized that this was done on purpose because the edges are “locations that might be construed as too obvious” and are “where children and adults alike might begin their search.”
- Waldo is never located on the very bottom of the right page. I was unsure about the reason for this at first, but [blog commenter] Chris Metzger offered a probable explanation: Whenever you flip to the next page in a book, the bottom of the right page is the first thing you see. Thus, the bottom of the right page would be one of the worst places to hide Waldo because that’s the most-viewed part of the book.
After sifting through the data, Olson then worked out an algorithm to plot the most efficient search pattern to find Wally as quickly as possible. The trick is to start searching at the bottom left-hand corner and work your way across the page as follows:
