Can you build a recognizable World Map in under 500 bytes?

iiweczek 3 days ago 26 commentsRead Article on experimentlog.com

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Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

chriscjcj•15 minutes ago

I know this doesn't meet the spirit of the challenge, but...

          _,--',   _._.--._____
   .--.--';_'-.', ";_      _.,-'
  .'--'.  _.'    {`'-;_ .-.>.'
        '-:_      )  / `' '=.
          ) >     {_/,     /~)
  snd     |/               `^ .'

simonw•about 3 hours ago

I didn't know you could do this with fetch() and a data: URI:

  fetch('data:;base64,1ZpLsgIxCEXnrM...==').then(
    r => r.body.pipeThrough(new DecompressionStream('deflate-raw'))
  ).then(
    s => new Response(s).text()
  ).then(
    t => b.innerHTML = '<pre style=font-size:.65vw>' + t
  )

BretonForearm•about 2 hours ago

Going from "SVG/Canvas is wasteful" to a tile based approach is a giant leap. Wouldn't AI suggest delta encoding of polyline coordinates and discretization of deltas as small, maybe just 2-4 bit integers? Storing the X and Y delta vectors separately, rather than interleaved, could lead to a further increase to the compression ratio.

What was asked of Claude? The article is very sparse on this.

1e1a•about 1 hour ago

I feel like this challenge would be a lot more interesting if the size of complete code needed to output the map were counted.

AaronAPU•about 3 hours ago

Is there a good known algorithm which performs general purpose compression where the target is a given turing complete instruction set? Rather than relying on a fixed general purpose decoder and the associated compressed data.

I’m asking here instead of asking an LLM because that’s what humans used to do and it was pleasant.

wizzwizz4•about 3 hours ago

A perfect implementation would be a Kolmogorov oracle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Halting_... suggests this is equivalent to a halting oracle. So, it depends what you mean by "good".

convolvatron•about 3 hours ago

that sounds pretty related to Kolgomorov complexity, which is uncomputable in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

I too would be interested in approximations or heuristics if anyone has any

gus_massa•2 days ago

Why is there a lake in Africa near Congo/Gabon istead of one near Uganda?

Also, can this be done with png? Most consecutive lines are very similar, so I'd expect the algebraic pass to be very useful.

cwmoore•about 2 hours ago

I like that yours is 45 rows of asterisks.

Makes me think a project-and-rasterize pipeline, sampling a simplified world water boundary map under a variety of projection parameters should give you a range of bitmaps, and then it is up to whoever to decide if the detail lost in all of this renders it incompatible with the world as they know it.

The site below takes detailed map files and removes significant detail for practical purposes:

https://mapshaper.org/

userbinator•about 2 hours ago

32x32 4bpp 16-color icon is 512 bytes. There definitely were programs that had a recognisable world map for an icon in those days, so the answer is yes.

ksymph•about 3 hours ago

Since the map just has two states - land or water - I wonder if there's a way to represent the same information more efficiently bits rather than bytes.

H8crilA•about 3 hours ago

Any decent compressor will take care of this - and much more.

hnuser123456•about 1 hour ago

Here's a map in one bit, where 0 is water and 1 is land: 0

27183•43 minutes ago

Yes. Here's a map of the entire world in 1 byte. Both hemispheres. The northern hemisphere is depicted above, the southern hemisphere is depicted below:

You're welcome.

FireBeyond•29 minutes ago

How is that "recognizable"?

27183•22 minutes ago

I claim it's obviously recognizable as the entire surface of a 3-sphere projected onto 2 dimensions, and therefore is clearly an acceptable answer to the original question posed. I added some helpful and clarifying prose expounding upon which hemisphere is what, but could have left that as an exercise to the reader without loss of generality.

Analemma_•about 3 hours ago

Presumably you could precompute some parametric function (probably a Fourier sum) which draws a reasonably close map of the world, and get that into 500 bytes with a math-focused programming environment (R, Julia, etc.)? I might try throwing Fable at this and seeing what I can get.

Analemma_•about 3 hours ago

Well, here's what Fable came up with in 499 bytes of R in about half an hour: https://pastebin.com/sBsiGD9t, result: https://imgur.com/a/W3eDdIC. Probably with sitting down and tweaking you could do even better, but I think this is a decent first start.

gus_massa•16 minutes ago

Did you or Fable decide to split North and South America?

Can the it also split Africa/Arabia/Eurasia?

Who/how decided which islands to keep and which to erase?

If you want to save a few characters, you can replace `length(v)` with the actual number.

cwmoore•about 1 hour ago

I can see leas than half of it. Imgur?

throwrioawfo•about 2 hours ago

What's the point in doing things like this if you just get Claude to do it?

StilesCrisis•9 minutes ago

What's the point of any of it to begin with? Why paint a painting? Why learn to play guitar?

hmry•4 minutes ago

Why make Claude play the guitar?

im3w1l•about 1 hour ago

Representation for this I came up with: Allocate one magic number for "start line with space" another for "start line with asterisk" then any other number means this many of the current character and then swap character.

Then it's a matter of picking a suitable way to encode numbers into bits.

I came up with groups of four bits. If the high bit is not set that is the number, if it is set then read an additional group of four bits, and interpret as a biased 7 bit number. This came out to 400 bytes not including decompressor.

iweczek•3 days ago

Experimenting with drawing a world map and micro-optimization.

effnorwood•about 3 hours ago

heck yea! 499 tera. no problem.