I apologize if I didn't give credit where credit was due. I actually don't know who first noticed Willy nor do I know who named him. The only place I've read about him is in the Wall Observer thread, so yes I was too quick in assuming that fellow Wall Observers were the first to notice him.
But your Reddit posts says its from "about a month ago." Weren't we talking about Willy in December on the Wall Observer thread? Does anyone remember when exactly the web and API interface went down and we watched Willy execute trades all alone? Wasn't that November or December? Were we calling him "Willy" at that point?
The discovery of the bot actually happened in December, yes. I had briefly described it during a live broadcast as a guest on Bonavest's trading show. It was also during a later broadcast that I took suggestions for a name. One of the other guests listed "Willy" as an option, so I later chose that one as the best of the bunch. From that point on, the name stuck. (It's kinda cool that it spread to everyone, LOL)
Check out the reddit thread I linked and you'll also see that I'm the one who captured and shared the screenshots the night the trading API went down. That was when I decided that it was highly likely that Willy was owned and operated by Gox itself. (A fact that I also shared on another live Bonavest trading show, as well as other places like tradingview.com)
Interestingly enough, I confronted neotufur (sp?) in the #mtgox channel on IRC about the bot a few weeks later, and he (or she?) adamantly denied the fact that the bot belonged to Gox. His explanation for how the bot could trade when nobody else could was something to the effect of: "if you have enough money, you can buy a direct privileged connection to our servers, so that's probably how the bot kept going when nobody else can trade." He then called me crazy for believing it belonged to Gox and almost banned me from the channel! (I'll try to dig up the IRC log for ya... it was amusing as hell!)
Whatever the case, I meant it when I said that it's no big deal. I really do like how you summarized the role that Willy might have had in this mess, and it's definitely plausible!
Edit: Here's some of my screenshots from when the trading API went down on January 7, 2013, but Willy was still making trades for the next 90 minutes while it was down for everyone else:
http://imgur.com/Ub46sWEand another:
http://imgur.com/wyW1g4p