I can sort of see how a computer program might run some colour-detection on that image to figure out a map, and then run some algorithms about the value of each pixel
You don't need to do any figuring out -- you already have an image. The image is a bitmap, just directly read the value of each pixel.
Your three questions are asking for different things and (1) and (2) are underspecified -- you will be trading off "variety" against closeness and you have to get precise about that.
For a not too large a map, it's probably easiest to just brute-force it. You can be sophisticated about it, but CPU time is much much cheaper than human time.
Your three questions are asking for different things and (1) and (2) are underspecified -- you will be trading off "variety" against closeness and you have to get precise about that.
I'm still trying to figure out which questions would provide the most useful answers for my purposes. If you don't mind my asking, what questions do you think are the ones I should be trying to get answers to?
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