[ealexhudson]

If we think of the 'budget' as being similar to a bandwidth limit on video playback, there's a kind of line below which the picture starts being pretty unintelligible, but for the most part that's a slider: the less the budget, the slightly less accurate playback you get.

But because this is clean data, I wonder if there's basically a big gap here: the codec that encodes the "correct rule" can achieve a step-change lower bandwidth requirement than similar-looking solutions. The most elegant ruleset - at least in this set of puzzles - always compresses markedly better. And so you can kind of brute-force the correct rule by trying lots of encoding strategies, and just identify which one gets you that step-change compression benefit.