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

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.

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

#5

Post by convolvatron » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

AaronAPU wrote: post #4

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.

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

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

#6

Post by Analemma_ » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

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.

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

#7

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 10:45 PM UTC

AaronAPU wrote: post #4

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.

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".

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

#8

Post by effnorwood » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC

heck yea! 499 tera. no problem.

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

#9

Post by ksymph » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC

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.

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

#10

Post by simonw » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 10:59 PM UTC

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 = '' + t
  )