Where's Willy?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| URL | http://www.whereswilly.com/ |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Money circulation tracker |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s): | English/French |
| Owner | |
| Created by | Hank Eskin |
| Launched | February 2001 |
| Current status | Active |
Where's Willy?, is a website that tracks Canadian paper money — most commonly five dollar bills, but also higher denominations. "Where's Willy" is free, supported by users who pay a fee for extra features. The name Willy refers to Sir Wilfrid Laurier - the first French Canadian Prime Minister whose portrait appears on the $5 bill.
Since Canada has replaced the one and two dollar bills with more durable coins, the $5 note is the smallest denomination tracked by Where's Willy.
The free site, established by Hank Eskin, a computer consultant in Brookline, Massachusetts, allows people to enter their local postal code and the serial and series of any Canadian denomination from $5 up to $100 they want to track. Once a bill is registered, the site reports the time between sightings, the distance traveled and any comments from the finders, and anyone who registered the bill earlier learns about it by e-mail and/or text messaging.
To increase the chance of having a bill reported, users write or stamp text on the bills encouraging bill finders to visit www.whereswilly.com and track the bill's travels.
Where's Willy? is a currency tracking spinoff of Where's George, a site that tracks United States dollars.
Where's Willy? is currently tracking over 2 million bills totaling over 30 million dollars.
[edit] Willy Index
The "Willy Index" is a method of rating users based on how many bills they've entered and also by how many total hits they've had. The formula is as follows:
![100\times\left[\sqrt{\ln({\rm bills\ entered})}+\ln({\rm hits}+1)\right]\times[1-({\rm days\ of\ inactivity}/100)]](../../../math/b/6/2/b62e7d70be985d88ab3ffe9b53a5ae5e.png)
Because of the nature of square roots and natural logarithms, the higher a user's bills entered and hits are, the more of each are necessary to increase the score.
