Mapping time series to Hilbert curve for finding similar time series

I don't think the point is to help 'understand' the data better, so much as to help you find similar series, which is admittedly a pretty narrow goal. That said, I posted it because I hadn't seen this tried, and it was creative, not because I think it's the best way to do this. Honestly, I think the most compact way to really approach this problem would be to make a covariance matrix of all the data and display it as a heatmap, which is probably easier too -- but this is also cool, and a bit surprising.

Thanks. I 'blind-spotted' the xkcd URL in your comment, and was going to add it. In the process, I hit the blog post ( http://blog.xkcd.com/2006/12/11/the-map-of-the-internet/ ) about it - interestingly, it was a rediscovery ...

The 'young fruit salad' tag, for the RGB cube, does take the cake, though ;-)

P.S. If memory serves, there was a neat Python turtle Tk graphics demo which slowly traced a colored Hilbert curve. Perhaps it's the 'fractaldemo' in http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html

The "fruit salad" visualization is beautiful.

In the comments, the original author of the Haskell code (Richard Smith) pops up and offers a terrifying 'golfed' one-liner version ...