Here's Waldo | Hacker News Reader

Here's Waldo

slate.com

82 pointsColinWright50 comments

>Handford generally shies away from putting Waldo near the bottom or top of a page, which leads me to theorize that Waldo placement is largely a function of two factors: aversion from extremes and aversion from the middle.

Perhaps the methodology is flawed, but this is exactly what I would expect. Ask someone to pick a "random number" in a given range and their response is actually quite nonrandom.

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/05/is-17-the-... http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2009/12/17/the-psyc...

>When asked to pick a random number between 1 and 100, most people will choose a number that is odd, often prime, and approximately 1/3 or 2/3 of the way between the lower and upper limits. For some reason we think these values are "more random" than other numbers.

The prime concept doesn't apply here, but this is basically what we see with the two bars.

It wouldn't surprise me that Handford is reasoning, if even subconsciously, about where a reader might look. The extremes and middles seem like good starting points. Similarly, if we are trying to create a "random number" we tend to avoid numbers that seem like they could be derived from something else. Like starting in the beginning, middle, or end of a range. Or by multiplying other numbers together (which is why I think we pick primes).

He's not at the edges of the page partially due to the print process. You need a large border of disposable material that can be cut from the edges (bleed) should the alignment of the pages be slightly out when the book is bound and trimmed. It wouldn't be much finding half of Wally, so they don't put him where he might be cut in two with a guillotine.

(He's still better as Wally than Waldo.)

I think the margin of error for this kind of printing is usually only 3mm though, so they could still put him pretty close to the edge if they wanted to

3-5mm is standard, but if I remember this books rightly they're fairly cheaply bound (it's been a while since I've seen my copy of the one in that post, saddle stitched or stapled). Assuming a 5mm bleed, you can have at most 1cm cut in from the edge, which is substantial.

That's still not enough to account for the size of the region of bias though.

And do, on some of them according to the map.

The most extreme cases all fell within book 5. I wonder what happened with book 5?

This reminds me of high school English class: let's obsessively analyze this book/play/whatever, trying to discern the secret meanings and fundamental truths the author has elaborately hidden inside his or her work.

When in actuality, the author was probably just writing what they wanted to, and what sounded good on the page. As in this case, where the author literally says, "I add Wally when I come to what I feel is a good place."

In college that happened to me when an author came and spoke about their work and when we asked them about all of the meanings and "hidden truths" we had been debated we were told they were all unintentional and had no deeper meaning.

Really took a lot of the magic out of reading books for me when I started meta analysing the discussions and the probability that there was no intentional hidden meaning in many of the stories we were reading.

Suppose a "hidden truth" turned out not to have been intended by the author — would that make it less true?

One of the beautiful things about art (and life) is that it literally is what we make of it (or what we can make from it using the evidence at hand).

Authorial intent is super interesting, of course, and can enrich your understanding, but it's also pretty rare information. Often the work itself is all that remains after the author's gone.

At that point, it doesn't matter what the author "meant". You read what they left you to read and get whatever value from that you can.

> Suppose a "hidden truth" turned out not to have been intended by the author — would that make it less true?

Yes, it's not true.

Unless it was a side effect, like if they came from a repressed society X and those effects bleed through to the story. Then there might be unintentional hidden meanings.

The concept art and culture is whatever the user sees it as is a cop out. (Unless the artist intended it that way)

We don't put up with it in the sciences, why put up with it in the arts?

It really doesn't matter if the author / artist intended it or not, if people together find a deeper meaning and talk about it, that's perfectly valid.

Unless you read Nabokov.

I think you missed the point. The point, to me at least, was that (a) humans have tendencies, and (b) the author of the article wanted to see if he could detect Handford's tendencies with simple analysis. It was a clever idea for an article and well done, I thought.

Reminds me of this great StackOverflow thread on how to programmatically find Waldo using Mathematica: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-wal...

This kind of spatial scan statistics is really easy to misuse without careful multiple-comparison corrections. Would they have reported a 52% effect? a 51% effect? What about 1.4 inch bands? or 1.2 inch bands? That "remarkably thin" 0.3 percent will disappear pretty quickly.

Sorry that this is dismissive, but this piece is just a slightly more complicated case of http://xkcd.com/882/

It's not a statistical model for future predictions. The whole point here is to over-fit as much as possible, because you only care about a single dataset.

Sorry, but if that were the case, then just showing the list of pages and their locations would get 100% of them, with 0% probability of being "by chance".

Then, you say "that's a complicated rule: no one can memorize the list", and that's fine. But finding the simplest rule that has the best fit can be shown, via the Minimum Description Length principle, to be equivalent to models with deep connections to statistical learning.

The gist of the matter is: even if you have a single dataset, statistical considerations are very important to make sure that the statements you make are sensible. That does not appear to be the case in this Slate piece.

He made no claim to minimal or maximal anything. His technique does give you an edge, though.

Agreed. It would have been more interesting if he'd developed his model/heuristic based on the first five or so books and then tested it on the remaining two to see if it held up.

I remember a mathematician's advice about playing lottery (other than "don't play it") - pick numbers near the edges of the coupon, as people avoid those places. This way you minimize the chance of having to split the jackpot with someone else (and yeah "don't play it" still holds :-) )

The same, in theory, applies to sequences like 1 2 3 4 5 6 "because that will never happen", and numbers >31 (birth days).

In practice though, the number of n jackpot winners is significantly less likely than 1... and do you really care if you only win $10M instead of $20M?

Except 1,2,3,4,5,6 is actually bought way more (by hundreds) than would be bought by random.

It's best to use a source of random numbers. Any rules you construct just makes it more likely someone else is using the same constructions.

Exactly. Using a scheme to try to figure out a lottery number that other people won't choose is like using "ZZZZZZZZ" as a password, on the basis that anyone who tries to brute force it will try that one last.

And never play the same numbers because if you play the same numbers all the time and they are the winning numbers the one week you don't play...

No worries, they might win again the following week!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6202...

I've always known him as Wally, it looks like "Waldo" is an american thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where's_Wally

He is called Charlie in French... "Où est Charlie ?"

This is a silly example of ex post evaluation of an ex post model. You need to have a holdout sample.

It's made more silly by the fact that they use the universe of Waldo books, so their "strategy" is essentially just "here's approximately the answer".

Slightly off topic, but I've always wondered... Is there any particular reason why they changed his name for the US editions? Is there something about "Wally" that sounds weird to Americans?

I've always been told that it's dumbing down, usually the line is "American children wouldn't understand it". I suppose it's the same as the Harry Potter books, "Philosopher" changed to "Sorcerer" in the title. It's very prevalent to change "foreign" names to Americanised ones.

Perhaps philosopher has a different connotation in UK English. Sorcerer just seems more appropriate in a book about magic.

The Philosofer's Stone[1] is a commonly used mythological item in fiction.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher's_stone

The term "Philosopher's stone" is from medieval european alchemical lore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher's_stone

I don't know if they imagined british kids all knowing about that, but I can assure you the term would be just as fantastical to them as to americans.

Interesting. Having never looked into the history of alchemy, I would never have associated philosophers with alchemy. Sorcerer just makes more sense (to me).

Except his name is changed in almost every country, so it's not "dumbing down":

Germany - Walter

Norway - Willy

France - Charlie

Denmark - Holger

Israel - Effi

Source: http://mentalfloss.com/article/22414/wheres-waldo-and-whos-w...

I'm not sure if that applies in this case... There's nothing to 'understand' about the name Wally or Waldo. They're both just random, invented names, AFAICT.

"Wally" would be a shortening of "Wallace", both are quite old names.

Or "Walter", which seems more common in the U.S.

(This comment brought to you by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Statistics.)

I don't believe (note: no statistics were examined in the making of this answer) "Waldo" is a particularly American name. "Wally" has at least some traction, if not particularly recently.

If you put the bands here instead, you get a whopping 54% of the points, http://imgur.com/kkqdyNR

So, I'm not convinced. Other than a slight void in the centre and at the edges, it looks like a fairly random distribution to me.

I'd love to see a more in depth examination of the clustering of those points.

Forget the measuring tape, find Waldo with Mathematica! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-wal...

I was hoping to hear about the statistical approach the author used to find the bands, that would have been far more interesting to me than postulating about the reasons for Waldo's placement.

The rule of thirds springs to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds

his pictures of the Waldo distribution remind me of the eigenvalues of the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble!

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~valko/courses/833/circle.jpg

I was expecting to learn that there are trivial Waldos at the nonnegative even integers and that the rest of the Waldos must be in the critical strip 0 < Re z < 1.

I was not disappointed.

Maybe I overlooked it skimming the article, but has anyone else noticed that the pattern of his location matches the pattern of his shirt?

As A kid I could not get enough of finding Waldo. I even had the Nintendo game.

I always liked the wizard best

Agree, and shoeless waldo.

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