Von Neumann's Elephant

> I am pretty sure they can come up with some other math concept which packs 8 numbers into one, not four.

Yes, those are called octonions.

Though I don't know if anyone has tried to use one to draw an elephant.

I enjoyed that a lot, thanks for sharing! Given arbitrary precision, the number of parameters becomes meaningless as a measure of model complexity, and even this one-parameter equation has infinite VC dimension.