Three maps of Middle-earth, drawn by three different peoples (an autoresearch experiment)
I've been building a Tolkien atlas, and most of it tries to get the geography right. I thought it would be fun to ask a different question: *how would each people draw the same world?*
I assume a Hobbit of the Shire wouldn't draw the same map as a Dwarf of Erebor, who wouldn't draw the same map as an Elf of Rivendell.
I was inspired by Karpathy's recent thinking on LLM "autoresearch" loops that draft, score, and iterate. I wanted to see whether the same pattern works for aesthetic problems rather than scientific ones. So I wrote a small loop: it drafts a map, scores it against an in-world rubric ("does this look like a Hobbit drew it? what would a Hobbit care about? what materials?"), then refines the prompt and tries again. Round after round, until something interesting emerges.
Nothing is what I'd call "perfect", but I thought each was cool in its own way.
Hope you enjoy...
Full page: https://rangeroftherealms.com/atlas/cartographers/