Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds

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.

apple.ndjson

apple_drawings.pdf

challenge_95_solution.yxzp

Developer

Reporting

Parse

Join

Spatial Analysis

Advanced

Data Analysis

Data Investigation

Transform

Spatial

Reporting and Visualization

Difficult

Accepted answers

All comments

LordNeilLord

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.

Spoiler

Challenge_95_LNL.yxmd

Challenge_95_LNL_Output.pdf

paul_houghton

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.

Spoiler

Completed workflow
Output

Full Output Image

Apple Analysis.pdf

challenge_95.yxzp

LilianH

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!

Spoiler

Output

Workflow

challenge_95_LH.yxzp

challenge_95_LH_output.pdf

NicoleJohnson

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...

Spoiler

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,

Challenge95_NicoleJohnson.yxzp

WeeklyChallenge95_PDF.pdf

patrick_digan

Fun challenge!

Spoiler

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.

challenge 95 DIGANv2.yxzp

Apple Drawings DIGAN.pdf

estherb47

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.

challenge_95_EHB_solution.yxmd

philipmannering

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

Here's the output:

Spoiler

And here's what the workflow looks like:

Spoiler

challenge_95 - Apple Drawing.yxmd

Natasha

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

Spoiler

challenge_95_natasha.yxmd

challenge_95_natasha.pdf

ggruccio

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

challenge_95_gg_finish.yxzp

SeanAdams

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!

Spoiler

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!

challenge_95_seanSolution.yxmd

Pretty fun!

Solution attached.

Challenge Completed

Challenge_95_Joe_Serpis.yxzp

Challenge_95_Results.pdf

jamielaird

Here's my solution.

Spoiler

challenge_95_JL.yxzp

challenge_95_JL_apple_drawings.pdf

Spoiler

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...

challenge 95.png

DavidP

Sorry, forgot to attache my workflow

challenge_95_DavidP.yxmd

JoBen

Cheers! That was a fun one!

Challenge_95_Joben_Solution.yxmd

dsmdavid

Interesting challenge. I went for 961 drawings to have a nice 31x31 square. Runs in <5 sec with "true heatmap" and in ~2 sec with pseudo heatmap.

Spoiler

Added a couple of formulas before the "create points" to create the "small multiple" look and feel.

Workflow - detour to choose true/pseudo heatmap

Result with pseudoheatmap (should be green, but it fails to maintain the color --reported bug)

True heatmap

I seem unable to upload my workflow, so here is a link https://dsmdaviz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/solved%2395.yxmd

Justin_0

So many apples! Took some work, had to peek at some others' solutions for ideas with the reporting tools, as I haven't used those as much, but got it done.

Spoiler

95.yxmd

PrivateStorm

My solution to challenge #95 is attached. This was a really difficult challenge but I was able to solve it without peeking at the solution.

challenge_95_FINISHED.yxmd

danilang

Apples to spare!

Heat Map.png

Spoiler

Dan

Challenge_95_Solution_dl.yxmd

pasccout

Here is my solution...

It draws and generates the file in 6.2 seconds or so... the only issue is that they are divided in rows of 27 starting on the left... not sure how you got them to more or less align left and right...

The original apples are in red but the report map object I used to get them to the layout puts them in black...

Spoiler

I basically built the apples one by one by record... got the corners... added the most right point of the first apple to the second one... rebuilt all apples and grouped them.

For rows, I got the tallest apple and added that to the next line.

challenge_95_my_solution.yxmd

RichoBsJ

Really fun challenge, I learned a lot of things!

Spoiler

weekly_challenge_095_richobsj.pdf

weekly_challenge_095_richobsj.yxmd

ipeng

Still learning all these reporting tools. But I made it!

IP_Challenge_95.yxzp

JoshuaGostick

This was quite tricky at first but glad to have finally got the output that I wanted.

Spoiler

challenge_95_JG.yxzp

HuwHallam

OMG that was sooooo hard @JoeM !! I used so many tools/processes for the first time. Macros. Spatial tools. Reporting. Parsing... Heatmaps!! The only thing I slightly cheated with (maybe) was reading the apples file (I chucked it into excel via a text edit tool). I don't love my final output (gotta do some work on harnessing those reporting tools) but I was mighty stoked when I got it all to run in ca 15s!

challenge_95_HH.yxzp

HuwHallam

Oh wow! I just checked your solution @JoeM and I would never have thought to use the layout tools to group individually mapped apples like that. I took a completely different approach, using my macro to shift the x and y coordinates of each apple and then creating a single map with the lot of them. Gotta say though, my workflow ran a good 10 seconds faster

Thanks - I really learnt a huge amount from this challenge!

kelly_gilbert

I was worried about this one, but it ended up to be pretty fun - just parsing and reporting! It took me a while to figure out how to match the colors.

Spoiler

Workflow:

Output:

challenge_95_solution_klg.yxzp

Verakso

Another challenge done, and this was one of the tougher ones.

I did not knew Alteryx could do that, and I guess it comes down to the hardware as well, since it took 1:06 on my machine to draw everything 😃

The Runtime

Spoiler

It took me a while to figure out, how to draw the apples, but my biggest challenge was how to do the actual reporting.

I will bluntly admit, that I had to look at some of the other solutions in order to figure that part out.

So in the end my solution ended up looking like this