topic Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds in Weekly Challenges

Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

JoeM — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 05:07:46 GMT

Last week’s solution can be found here!

This week is Thanksgiving week in the USA and I was thinking of two ways we could take these challenges: 1) Make it super easy to match the short week or 2) Or long... long enough to give those of you balancing in-laws, distant relatives, and chaos this week a temporary escape. I hope the Weekly Challenge can be that one work thing you really 'need to do today or my boss isn't going to be happy'. I went for the latter. Weekly Challenge has got your back.

This week we are focused on working with data from the game of "Quick, Draw!". Here you can play a game where the computer asks you to draw a picture, and as you draw the picture live, the machine will guess what you are drawing based on a wealth of pictures from other users – machine learning at it’s finest!

This week we will try to take around one thousand pictures of apples from a special file type called .ndjson (new-line delimited JSON) generated from "Quick, Draw", reconstruct it into an image, and develop a heat plot of all the apples and some samples of apples that were drawn. Each record in the data set represents on drawing and contains an array of numbers that represent pixel coordinates on the canvas of the picture ranging from 0-255 for both x and y. The syntax of arrays are as follows:

[

[ // First stroke

[x0, x1, x2, x3, ...],

[y0, y1, y2, y3, ...]

[ // Second stroke

[x0, x1, x2, x3, ...],

[y0, y1, y2, y3, ...]

... // Additional strokes

]

For additional documentation on the simplified .ndjson file, see here.

The file we have provided contains 1000 apple drawings, but if you are interested in drawing 150K of them or something else entirely check out all the full library of data here.
As an output, try emulate the output that we made here in PDF:

Drawings will run onto a second page or more based on how it was sized

A tool from the predictive tool install was used in this solution. If you’d like to generate the visual shown in this sample PDF, please go to downloads.alteryx.com and download our predictive package. If not, just try drawing all the apples with a workflow!

This week there will be no start file! Instead we have attached two things - 1) The .ndjson file from which the drawing are constructed (we are not providing a start file because connecting to the data is a big part of the challenge) and 2) the PDF of the desired output.

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

LordNeilLord — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 12:33:17 GMT

Finally got there (or close enough for me)! I managed to get the heat map pretty quickly, the drawings took a little longer because the settings I needed were buried deep within some config settings. But compiling all of this into a report was a nightmare! A real nightmare! These reporting tools are awful, lets hope Plot.ly brings some usability to Alteryx reporting. I look forward to seeing the solution so I can see where I was going wrong.

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

paul_houghton — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 11:31:47 GMT

I found this task was both interesting and frustrating. The spatial part of the work was really interesting and intuitive. It stretched my knowledge and ability in the spatial tool set, I really enjoyed that portion. The Reporting portion of the task was just frustrating. The reporting tools are not intuitive, they not easy to use and they require far too many individual tools to achieve the final goal. The Visual Layout Tool is the first step on that path and hopefully D3 will add more to the visualising capabilities but there is a long way to go.

Completed workflow
Output
Full Output Image

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

LilianH — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 05:22:38 GMT

The crowd-sourced drawings are too cool, and I thought this was an interesting application of the heat map and spatial tools. Definitely had to play around with the reporting tools, and unfortunately everything got laggy once I brought in the report map tool. I couldn't get the apple drawings to appear as unconnected polylines without adding the macro, so I'm interested to see what others come up with!

Output

Workflow

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

NicoleJohnson — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 18:49:54 GMT

What a cool challenge!! Who knew Alteryx could draw?!? Very fun way to spend my Black Friday morning rather than battling the crowds at the mall...

Was actually able to draw the apples just fine, but took me some digging to figure out how to change the line color (because apples should be red, not grey) and then get them displayed correctly in a table. I'm on the same page as others about the reporting tools... they're not my favorite. BUT this definitely helped illustrate some of the cool, outside-the-box things you can do with the reporting & predictive tools, if you're willing to dig in a little deeper!

I tried it just for fun with one of the other NDJSON files too, the one for airplane drawings... pretty cool to see it work for a different drawing type as well!

Thanks for the awesome Thanksgiving week challenge, @JoeM!

Cheers,

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

patrick_digan — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 14:07:39 GMT

Fun challenge!

I reused some lat long calculations that @Joe_Mako came up with in a previous challenge. My heat map was flipped from the solution pdf but I decided to leave it as is. I'm going to check out the other's solutions.

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

estherb47 — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 19:48:00 GMT

Had some challenges with the mapping tool and getting the apples to render as more than blobs. Wondering if the tool just needs better documentation?

Anyways, my solution is attached.

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

philipmannering — Sat, 16 Dec 2017 16:00:27 GMT

Really enjoyed this one. I don't do enough image analysis.

Here's the output:

And here's what the workflow looks like:

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

Natasha — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 12:14:23 GMT

It took me quite some time to create points, but most of my time was spent on figuring out how to zoom to the drawing. I am getting used to charting tools more as a lot of challenges recently involved creating charts, but otherwise I am a happy Tableau user.

Fun challenge overall

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

ggruccio — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 17:35:35 GMT

Loved it! I kept getting a stray apple that rendered huge, so forced to 25 columns and 40 rows.

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

SeanAdams — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 05:43:04 GMT

Still in the Andamans - and although I couldn't find a good apple picture, there are a lot of mangrove trees if that counts? You can see where the Tsunami damaged a wide path in the mangroves; with younger trees that have been planted to help recovery.

Very interesting challenge - used several tools that don't get much exercise in my installation of Alteryx!

Most folk seem to have used the same approach to get to the heatmap (JSON parse into the predictive heatmap tool)

Some variety in how folks have done the apple pictures:

@patrick_digan used the summarize tool for the report type - nicely done, I'd never seen that done before, but should have been obvious!
@philipmannering, @LordNeilLord, @paul_houghton; and @JoeM used the layout tool to do the grouping
@LilianH; @estherb47; and @NicoleJohnsondid individual maps and then used a create columns tool
In a continuing theme – I went the long way round, and used an offset function to change the X and Y coordinates to allow all the shapes to be drawn in one go – but then spent ages trying to align this.

By offsetting the X & Y Coords, it creates a simple grid using a single mapThe output!

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

samN — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 01:21:39 GMT

Pretty fun!

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

LordNeilLord — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 12:26:59 GMT

I'm loving these comparison write ups @SeanAdams, it must be alot of work for you...but you seem to have nothing else to do

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

jasperlch — Mon, 01 Jan 2018 12:31:43 GMT

Solution attached.

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

JosephSerpis — Sat, 27 Jan 2018 16:39:14 GMT

Challenge Completed

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

jamielaird — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 16:25:38 GMT

Here's my solution.

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

kat — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 20:05:28 GMT

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

DavidP — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 12:56:43 GMT

This was seriously my toughest challenge yet!

I started of with the json parse tool, but then thought it would take me forever to figure out which X goes with which Y, so I decided to dive into the data myself armed with my trusty formula and text to columns/rows tools. From then on it was plain sailing until I had to figure out how to draw the apples on the same page (and not on top of each other!!!!) Looking back at my workflow now, I struggle to understand how so much pain can fit into so few tools!!!!!!! I really hate you Report Map Tool and layout Tool!!!! We used to be friends, but not any more...

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

DavidP — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 12:58:46 GMT

Sorry, forgot to attache my workflow

Re: Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

JoBen — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 14:18:47 GMT

Cheers! That was a fun one!