alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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selcuka • today at 1:10 AM
Yeah. I had to read the comment a few times to make sure that I'm not missing anything, but you are right. Those are two distinct things.
As a side note, the title is not accurate either because the method in the article can compress only one flag to 11 bits:
> Using this format, the average flag can be represented in 76 bits, with a median of 55 bits.
One can use Huffman encoding (the same encoding the article uses) to compress one of the flags to a single bit.
The actual article borders on just using IDs too. Things like the Union Jack are just stored as is.
The techniques here let you encode the currently existing flags but aren’t really enough to build a flag from scratch.