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Lewis Carroll once wrote a story about a king who wanted a very
accurate map of his kingdom. The king had a pathologically
fastidious eye for detail and consequently decided that the map was
to be produced at a scale of 1:1. The scribes dutifully set to and,
in time, the map was made. The map carried details of every tree,
every rock and every blade of grass throughout the entire land. The
problem occurred when they tried to use -it. First of all, the map
was extraordinarily difficult to open out and line up with the
countryside. Its sheer bulk meant that it took whole armies to
carry it and a great host of bureaucrats and technicians to
maintain the information. Such was the detail of the map that as
soon as the wind blew strongly, whole sections needed to be
redrawn. What was worse was that all the farmers protested because
the map completely cut out the light from the sun and all the crops
died. Eventually the howls of protest became so strong that the
king was forced to take action. He did away with the old paper copy
and decided to use the kingdom itself as the map. All lived happily
ever after. There are, at least, two morals to this tale. First,
you are almost certainly doomed to failure if you do not get the
representation of the problem right.
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