This is either genius or disturbing. Probably both.
Proof positive that simple puzzle games reign supreme even in this age of suffocating modern technology comes in the form of modern technology being constructed purely to win a simple puzzle game.
Where’s Wally – or Waldo to our American and Canadian friends – is still big business in 2018.
Hell, the iconic style titan even popped up on Google Maps before the summer kicked off.
Now comes the genuinely disturbing news that a robot named There’s Waldo (very clever) has been purpose-built to point Wally (we’re going to stick with what we’re used to, name-wise) out.
Complete with a not-creepy-at-all silicone hand to do the literal pointing.
Clip via redpepper
That bit where the cold dead hand smacks onto the page? Nightmare fuel.
Still, shout-out to the creative minds at US creative agency Redpepper for their work.
But just how does it work?
It’s a combination of photo recognition software and a face analyser, so all very Bourne movie so far.
If the robot determines a match of 95% or higher, that hand dives on in with gusto.
Redpepper Creative Technologist Matt Reed tells The Verge that all of the Wally ‘training images’ came from rigorous Google Image searching.
In the end, he had 62 individual Wally heads and 45 heads along with Wally’s body to play with.
“I thought that wouldn’t be enough data to build a strong model but it gives surprisingly good predictions on that weren’t in the original training set,” notes Reed, who adds that it took about a week to code the robot in total.
Which is a scary enough thought, and then there’s that hand. Yikes.
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