Watch an AI-Powered Robot Take the Fun Out of 'Where's Waldo'

"There's Waldo" is the name of an AI-powered robot that has been trained to swiftly suck all the fun out of the beloved children's books. As Popular Mechanics reports, the robot can pick Waldo's pom-pom beanie and striped shirt out of a crowd in just 4.45 seconds, "which is better than most 5-year-olds," according to the robot's maker.

Built by creative agency Redpepper, the robot is linked to Google's AutoML Vision service, which was fed 107 photos of Waldo from Google Images.

"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," Matt Reed, creative technologist at Redpepper, tells The Verge.

The robot's mechanical arm is equipped with a Vision Camera Kit, which lets it snap photos of the page and send them to AutoML Vision to be analyzed. Disconcertingly, the otherwise industrial-looking robot has a rubber hand that it uses to point to Waldo when it's at least 95 percent sure that the man on the page is, indeed, Waldo. Alas, once the machines take over, "Where's Waldo?" will just be one more phrase that future generations won't understand.

[h/t Popular Mechanics]