How little information do you need to be able to draw a map? This zen-like question provided the basis for a short article in the May 21st, 1971 issue of Nature, intriguingly entitled Construction of Maps from “Odd Bits of Information”.
One of the experiments involved a map of 88 French departments (excluding the Corsican and Parisian ones), with the only information available being “whether or not one of the 3,828 pairs of departments shares a common boundary.” The map thus computer-produced is one “in which each department is represented by a point, but this system of linked points is converted to a honeycomb of cells by exploiting a natural duality.”
The maps show France as it really is, and France reconstructed from abuttal data. Please note that the departments are numbered not in the usual alphabetical order, but by “an alternative which approximately orders the departments first by longitude and then by latitude.”
