Maybe there's an allegory to the sciences. But I rather a model be suboptimal in encoding that can be used to generate hypothetical reasonable flags in its unpopulated states, than having an optimal encoding which doesn't answer questions or reveal possibilities in its unpopulated states. Like what does flag #0xFE look like in an 8-bit encoding? I really like the idea of driving compressed trees in reverse with random data to generate new fascinating (valid) sequences.

Also, for compressing into 8 bits - is this not like saying "I can compress all of Shakespeare's plays in 6 bits" because there are ~39 plays, but then the size of the "shakespearezip" is just the sum of the works?

I don't understand why this is the top comment. The article isn't about encoding a bag of unique items, it's about drawing the flag. So of course you can do it in 8 bits, because you're just storing the "id", not how to draw it.

A spec-compliant Unicode renderer is expected to render 259 flags [1]. So 8 bits isn't quite enough. You would need 9.

Obviously an arbitrary bitmap of dimensions that could be used for a recognizable flag would need orders of magnitude more storage. The constraint that we are representing a finite set of flags is what admits such a compact representation.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences....

I’m surprised that the near-identical flags list omits Slovenia and Slovakia which both have white-blue-red horizontal stripes and a coat of arms (albeit with slightly different placement and different background colors on the coats of arms). A part of me feels like it’s part of a long-time joke the two countries are playing to confuse non-Slavs (the Slovenian word for their language is Slovenščina while the Slovak word for their language is Slovenčina and this is just the beginning of the confusion between the two countries/nationalities).

There are only 500K or so full length feature films so we should be able to encode them in about 18 bits or so. Who needs mp4 anyway!

I can't believe that second article doesn't include images of the flags it is talking about. Not even the links provided for each country show the flag...

you could also exploit the fact that some flags may appear more frequently than others and use huffman encoding or something to encode the commonly used flags in a shorter sequence than rarely-mentioned countries, and save some bits on average

but then you have to have the svg built into decoder. will they be smaller than 5KB?

also then it's no different from a svg sprite

I had exactly the same idea. I would give them even 9 bits to have headroom