Can you build a recognizable World Map in under 500 bytes? • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by Analemma_ » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #6

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.

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.

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

#12

Post by H8crilA » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC

ksymph wrote: post #9

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.

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

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

#13

Post by throwrioawfo » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 11:27 PM UTC

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

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

#14

Post by BretonForearm » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

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.

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

#15

Post by userbinator » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 11:48 PM UTC

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.

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

#16

Post by cwmoore » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 11:59 PM UTC

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/

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

#17

Post by 1e1a » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 12:44 AM UTC

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

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

#18

Post by cwmoore » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 12:52 AM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #11

Analemma_ wrote: post #6

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.

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.

I can see leas than half of it. Imgur?

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

#19

Post by hnuser123456 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 12:53 AM UTC

ksymph wrote: post #9

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.

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

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

#20

Post by im3w1l » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

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.