Also Parallella[1]. I have two of their 16 (+ 2 ARM cores) core demonstration units sitting in a box somewhere. They were fun, and I'm sad they didn't get much further - I think they did get a 64 core version done, but the longer term goal was a 4096 core grid. You could directly access the memory in each core, and there was a predictable cycle count to do so based on location in the grid, so you could write algorithms that'd run in lock-step if you wanted.
There's also XMOS[2] that appears to have morphed quite far from the original concept but is still focused on parallelism.
The challenge for both is that it's really hard to carve out a decent sized space alongside regular CPUs and GPUs. They can't compete with CPUs on single core performance, and so far can't compete with GPUs on concurrency. Both seemed to try to carve out space in embedded / low powered systems. XMOS seems to have somewhat succeeded (at least they're still alive), while Parallella/Adapteva failed.
They're used by map makers to prevent other map makers from freeriding on the original work. They're less worried about personal copies and much more interested in deterring commercial reuse.
That doesn't answer my questions although I now realize I made a bad assumption. This is a modern technique. I misread the bit about Greece on the wikipedia article and somehow got it in my head that it was more ancient.
So I think to answer my question more directly, yes, it's just copyright laws.
My point, before understanding that, was that from the map consumer's perspective it doesnt make a difference. And from the original creator's perspective it has a little accuracy cost. So without an additional mechanism I didn't see the disincentive for copiers. So I wondered if it was some ancient form of copyright law or just strong sense of morals or what.
Deliberate traps are a modern 20th-century practice. In old times, each mapmaker made their own innocent mistakes, and those mistakes got copied into other mapmakers' work. In other words, historians can plot "family trees" of maps, and figure out who copied from whom, based on which errors appear on which maps and on what date. Apparently California drawn as an island lasted about a century because engravers copied each other.
There were a few factors discouraging mapmakers from blatantly copying each other:
Rulers granted printing monopolies from the late 1400s. A mapmaker like Ortelius would print "cum privilegio" (lol) on a map. If you copied it, your expensive copper plates could be seized, along with a hefty fine.
Spain and Portugal each had a master chart which were state secrets because they held navigation knowledge worth a fortune. Portugal handed out severe punishments for leaking charts. (Leaks still happened: the Cantino planisphere was smuggled from Lisbon to Italy in 1502.)
Booksellers' guilds kept registers of who owned which work, and enforced it.
And lastly, copying meant hand-engraving a new copper plate, which took months of work and real skill. The practical barriers alone got rid of most of the copiers, but it didn't stop the big houses.
(I used Claude to research this fascinating rabbit hole, so I'm basically paraphrasing here. But this comment is my own original writing, so treat it as you like.)
It means something, because it an iterative workflow. If you're willing to burn tokens, it's possible for weaker models to implement tasks by incrementally improving drafts.
Facebook used the same strategy to compete with Google Maps. The company became one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap, which everyone has benefited from downstream.
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