Gallery: This Bot Tweets a Totally Fantastical Map Every Hour
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This incredibly convincing, but totally fake, map was created by a terrain generator.
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Welsh glaciologist Martin O’Leary created the generator. He also created a Twitter bot that tweets fictional maps. They look like something you’d find in a James Michener novel, if his cartographers weren’t beholden to reality.
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The @unchartedatlas feed features more than 4,000 unique maps with names like the Marches of Uymíyuynown and the Central Empire of Inner Šapu ča Čiki.
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It works according to layers algorithmic design, all coded by O'Leary.
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First, it creates a topographical map. Next comes an erosion operation, which determines how water will flow through the land. Then shading and texturizing illustrates the terrain. Finally, cities and borders appear.
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O’Leary even created a name generator to ensure his maps are labeled in distinct fictional languages.
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This layered approach allows O'Leary to do what many other procedural map-makers have not: create maps look like they fell from the pages of a book.
