Birbla

Discussion summary

A user claims to create a recognizable world map in under 500 bytes, sparking discussions on feasibility and purpose.

What the discussion says

  • Some believe it's possible to create a recognizable map within 500 bytes.
  • Others question the point of such micro-optimization or its recognizability.
  • Participants discuss previous attempts and the significance of such challenges.
“Here's a map of the entire world in 1 byte.”
— 27183
“I did it 10 years ago by myself in 1013 bytes :)”
— iweczek

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • 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/

    by cwmoore
  • I feel like this challenge would be a lot more interesting if the size of complete code needed to output the map were counted.
    by 1e1a
  • 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.

    by gus_massa
  • 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.
    by Analemma_
  • 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.

    by AaronAPU
  • 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.

    by BretonForearm
  • 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
  )
    by simonw
  • I know this doesn't meet the spirit of the challenge, but...

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

Explore Birbla archives