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Challenge 13: A Picture's Worth 140 Characters

Problem

Twitter has just disabled their picture upload system! You accept the change, but still want to tweet pictures to everyone. But how are you going to do that? By image compression, of course!

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to write two programs (both counting towards your size): one that takes a .png file as input and outputs a compressed version in a string that is 140 characters or less, and one that takes that string and converts it back to a .png file. The converted image must at least be recognizable. You may use any character set, so long as it can be tweeted. Test images will be uploaded later.

Deadline
October 26, 2014, 1:00 AM EST

If any further clarification is needed, contact me. I will try to make you get the picture.

N/A

Rank	User	Size	Date	Code
1	N/A	N/A	N/A

Language Ranking

Rank	Lang	User	Size	Date	Code
1	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

Hmm. Something that compresses a whole image to 140 bytes. Unless your image is small that might be impossible.

Umm...Actually, we're not compressing a whole image. You can reduce the quality before compressing. Or turn it into polygon shapes.

Bump.

Remember, you can lower the quality of the image, use CJK and emoji, etc.

The quality of the compressed image should be an important scoring metric, but it cannot really be quantified according to a formula. I'm familiar with this kind of contest being categorized as a "popularity contest" rather than a code golf contest. If you really do want to run with this contest idea, you might need to re-evaluate how scoring is done.

Also, this contest has basically be done before on another site, only with the requirement that the 140 characters be printable ASCII (0x20-0x7E).

Again with the bad contest...but why didn't you warn me two contests ago, when I freaking announced it?

Considering Omni now averages at 10 posts a day every weekend (which is even lower than in 2008), I guess I am not surprised, but again perhaps the idea didn't interest many people or the deadline is too short.  Perhaps try to make them bi-weekly or monthly during the rest of the school year? It might also be the fact that it's the 13th contest so inevitably interest die down after a while.

I would say extend the deadline for now, especially that the Months of Trolling have started.


IMHO the contest is quite hard because I can't seem to figure out how someone can compress a PNG under 140 bytes unless it's a ridiculously small sprite image or Atari-like material. >.<

I guess since a lot of people use non-calc languages for your contests, the fact that it was heavily based on another contest might not have helped, though.

Yes. Normally mini-contests that don't involve the making of big calculator hits that aren't super hard to make tend to die after like 3 instances in the calculator community. Actually, one idea would be to revive Cage Matches, like Pimath wanted to do once.

On a side note, I wonder if those contests should be located in the contest sub-forum or if that sub-forum is restricted to contests started by staff?