John D. Cook used Mathematica’s CountryData database to find similar world flag designs and I’m shocked at how many are practically identical bar slightly darker/lighter shades of colour:
A week ago I posted some pairs of similar flags on Twitter, and later I found that Mathematica’s CountryData database contains flag descriptions. So I thought I’d use the flag descriptions to see which flags Mathematica things are similar.
I had Mathematica output a list of countries and flag descriptions, then searched the output for the word “similar.” I then made the following groupings based on the output [1].
While some of countries that share a similar flag are close in proximity and culture, Indonesia and Monaco isn’t as similar and not very close together, geographically:
![Indonesian flag - a red rectangle on the top half and a white rectangle on the bottom half but the overall flag shape is more elongated than the Monaco flag](https://www.johndcook.com/flags/Indonesia.png)
![Monaco - a red rectangle on the top half and a white rectangle on the bottom half but the overall flag shape is more of a square compared to Indonesia's](https://www.johndcook.com/flags/Monaco.png)
Geography related: How many countries can you name in Europe? (QUIZ)