AI robot arm scans Where's Wally books to find elusive character in seconds

Whole process takes just a matter of seconds.

Next time you're struggling on a particularly challenging page of Where's Wally, there could be an easy solution.

A robot with the sole purpose of picking out the elusive Wally's face in a crowd has been built.

Designed by creative agency Redpepper the robot uses artificial intelligence software to recognise Wally in a crowd of other fictional faces and then uses a robotic arm to point him out.

Matt Reed, the creative technologist at Redpepper, told The Verge: “I got all of the Waldo training images from Google Image Search; 62 distinct Waldo heads and 45 Waldo heads plus body.

"I thought that wouldn’t be enough data to build a strong model but it gives surprisingly good predictions on Waldos that weren’t in the original training set.”

The achievement was made possible by Google’s Cloud AutoML which lets users train their own AI tools without any previous coding knowledge.