{"id":9767,"date":"2014-12-15T11:16:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-15T16:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9767"},"modified":"2014-12-15T11:16:00","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T16:16:00","slug":"eureka-waldo-at-the-galaxy-zoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/12\/15\/eureka-waldo-at-the-galaxy-zoo\/","title":{"rendered":"Eureka: Waldo at the Galaxy Zoo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Medium, they’ve published a long excerpt<\/a> from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist<\/a>, that gives a good flavor of what the book’s really like. It’s about how the process for solving hidden-object games like the classic Where’s Waldo<\/cite> books is comparable to the process used by Henrietta Leavitt to revolutionize our understanding of the universe:<\/p>\n

\nThere are multiple web sites and academic papers devoted to computer algorithms for locating Waldo within Handford\u2019s drawings, using a variety of software packages, and these are impressively complex, running to hundreds of lines of code and invoking sophisticated image-processing tools. Child\u2019s play, this is not.<\/p>\n

The essential element of these books is pattern matching, looking for a particular arrangement of colors and shapes in the midst of a distracting field. There are numerous more \u201cadult\u201d variations on this game, some of them obvious, like the image-based \u201chidden object\u201d puzzle games Kate sometimes plays for relaxation, or the classic video game Myst. Other classes of games may not seem directly connected, but use the same pattern-finding tricks, such as solitaire card games like Free Cell (my own go-to time-waster) or colored-blob-matching games like the massively popular Candy Crush. In all of these, the key to the game is spotting a useful pattern within a large collection of visual data. This is a task at which human brains excel, and millions of people do it for fun and relaxation.<\/p>\n

The unmatched ability of humans to spot meaningful patterns in visual data is the basis for many scientific discoveries, in all sorts of different fields.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is cut down from Chapter 4 of the book (which adds the story of Jocelyn Bell’s discovery of pulsars), but keeps the core structure of the chapters: a story about an everyday activity, an then an analogy connecting that to a great scientific discovery. It also ends with some encouragement to go out and put your inner scientist to work, but you’ll need to read the whole piece<\/a> to get that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Medium, they’ve published a long excerpt from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, that gives a good flavor of what the book’s really like. It’s about how the process for solving hidden-object games like the classic Where’s Waldo books is comparable to the process used by Henrietta Leavitt to revolutionize our understanding of the… Continue reading Eureka: Waldo at the Galaxy Zoo<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9649,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,67,18,680,80,339,7,37,132,11,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-astronomy","category-book_writing","category-books","category-eureka","category-history_of_science","category-outreach","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-publicity","category-science","category-science_books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}