The Fastest Way To Find Waldo

less than 1m read

·Nov 10, 2024

Here's how to become scary good at finding Waldo.

In 2015, data scientist Randall Olssen used all 68 of Waldo's hiding spots in the seven primary books to build this kernel density estimate. So where's Waldo really? He's here!

Now, there are more ways to connect these 68 dots than there are atoms in the observable universe, and that makes it very hard for us to find the perfect path for our eyes to trace across each page to find Waldo the fastest.

Olsen estimates it would take the 10 largest supercomputers on Earth more than 10 unvigentian times longer than the universe has existed to find the perfect solution. So instead, he used a genetic algorithm to find a nearly perfect solution.

This is how you start: on the left at the top of the bottom third, scan across for a bit and then jump up to the bottom of the top third. Move about halfway into the right page and then dive down.

If Waldo isn't there, check the very middle or the edges. Using this method, I've been able to find Waldo in an average of like 10 seconds per page. It's incredible! And guess what? Waldo has never once found me.

Introduction to sampling distributions | Sampling distributions | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

History of Fentanyl in America | Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller

View All

Worked example: Calculating E° using standard reduction potentials | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

Let’s do a worked example where we calculate the standard potential at 25 degrees celsius for this reaction. In this redox reaction, silver cations are reduced to form solid silver, and solid chromium is oxidized to form the Cr3 plus ion. The first step …

The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay

I haven’t started with questions from Twitter before, but I feel like they kind of covered some of the initial ones I wanted to go off with, uh-huh. So maybe we should just go with those. All right, so the first one was from Ben Thompson, and he asked fo…

The Reason Why Cancer is so Hard to Beat

An undead city under siege, soldiers and police ruthlessly shooting down waves of zombies that flood from infected streets, trying to escape and infect more cities. This is what happens when your body fights cancer, more exciting than any movie. How does …

Determining and representing the domain and range of exponential functions | Khan Academy

We’re told to consider the exponential function f, which they’ve after righted over here. What is the domain and what is the range of f? So pause this video and see if you can figure that out. All right, now let’s work through this together. So let’s fir…

Writing a quadratic when given the vertex and another point | Algebra 1 (TX TEKS) | Khan Academy

We’re told a quadratic function f has a vertex at (-4, 7) and passes through the point (-2, -5). Write an equation for f in vertex form. So pause this video and try to work that out before we do that together. All right, so first let’s think about the ge…

To the Moon and Not Back? | StarTalk

So if I don’t mean to get morbid on you, but if you had died on the moon, were we ready for that here in America, here on Earth? Every president has a speechwriter, a staff, and a staff writer. The president would of course prepare for the event if some d…

The Fastest Way To Find Waldo

More Articles