Solution: Where are They?

Answer: KINDERGARTEN

Written by Chris Jones

In this giant collage, solvers should look around until they notice the five Where's Wally characters hidden in the image: Wally, Wenda, Odlaw, Woof, and Wizard Whitebeard.

As for the collage, although it initially looks meaningless, after staring at the images for a while solvers should realize that they are looking at a map of the world. Each country has an image associated conceptually with the country (Elon Musk with South Africa, (food) pyramid with Egypt, lotus flower with India) or punning on the country’s name (a “Q Weight” for Kuwait next to some “Bah-rain” and an “iRock”) or in rare cases a clue for a major city of the country (a split in Croatia, Sophia the robot for Bulgaria). The images are laid out approximately geographically (as best as could be hoped for when the world map is compressed like this).

Answering the title question, the Wally characters are found in the countries Iceland, Turkey, El Salvador, Mali, Seychelles (ordered top to bottom). The first letters of these countries spell ITEMS. In the (non-original versions of the) original Where's Wally? book, readers also had to find twelve of Wally's lost items, exactly one per page. These items are also scattered about the collage.

The items replace normal country images in the collage - for example the binoculars are in Nigeria. The country must be determined by identifying some surrounding countries and figuring out which one is geographically missing. When the items are ordered by page in Where's Wally, the first letters of the countries spell out the answer, KINDERGARTEN, a different answer to the question, “where are Wally and friends?”

These images highlight the locations of the Wally characters, the continent boundaries (including the boundary of the Middle East), and the locations of the items. The full list of pairings between images and countries can be found after the Author's Notes.

Author’s Notes

Whew! Evidently, this puzzle required quite a bit of research, image searching, image cropping, and image positioning. I used Gimp which was just suitable enough to do all the cropping and layer management. If I had to do it again, I might look for a code solution to crop the background out of photos (which would probably work for 70% of the images) and also to actually place the images with a good-looking amount of overlap.

I did write code to help find a reasonable layout of the countries of the world. In my physics simulation, I gave each country a repulsive force between other countries, attached a planar graph of springs between countries to maintain the general shape, and finally added small attractive forces to an equally-spaced grid of points. The final result was the following picture:

When all the image cropping was said and done, only the continent boundaries remained untouched!

Somehow, neither of the two puzzles I wrote for this hunt had any text (this puzzle and Cuspidation). I guess that's something!