How to Divide COTW into 10 Groups?

First of all, these are the country count by continents:

The first logical step is to move some Middle Eastern countries into Africa to make 3 groups, move some Central American countries into South America to form a Latin America group (while Guyana and Suriname can go the other way), and move the island countries in Indian Ocean into Oceania group to make it closer to 18. So here is my first cut:

This is not too bad. Six of the ten groups already fall within my 18 to 21 countries criteria. So how can I make further adjustments?

• Western Europe vs North America and the Caribbean: I need to move at least 3 countries out. I decide to do a "Brexit" and move UK and Ireland to the North America group as they all speak English. I pick Malta to be the third one to go, since it was a British colony, an island country, and kind of speak English too.
• East & South Asia vs Oceania & Indian Ocean Islands: I need to move at least one across. East Timor seems a logical choice, as its socio-economic status is more similar to the Pacific Islands than Southeast Asian countries. Sri Lanka can be moved too, as I already have Maldives along with Seychelles and Mauritius in the Oceania group to make up the numbers. Moving both will make the number of countries in each group more even.

So here are my final results:

I put the task to ChatGPT using the following prompt:

Divide the countries of the world into 10 even groups, each with around 18 to 21 countries, and the countries in each group should be geographically and culturally related as much as possible.

I won't go through its full response here (you can try it yourself). The major difference to mine was that it put Russia, Caucasus & Central Asia in a group together with some Middle Eastern countries, South Asia plus Indian Ocean islands plus other Middle Eastern countries in another.

In summary, the result was disappointing, as it missed 21 countries (the entire Oceania ex PNG were missing), repeated 10 countries in multiple groups, and included several non-sovereign territories in the list. I then asked ChatGPT:

What countries are missing from the above list?

It then reckoned it had missed 14 countries (not the 21, such as Australia and Greece). I then asked "what about Australia?", and it finally admitted that it had made a mistake. Anyway, if you rely on ChatGPT, you should be careful and make sure you double check the answer.

I put the same task to DeepSeek. If you have used it before, you would know that it blabs a lot before giving you an answer. In my case, it went on and on and struggled for over 4 minutes before giving me the final answer (I don't know how much CO₂ it has emitted as a result).

The major difference to mine was that it put the North African and all the Middle Eastern countries into one group, and the rest of Africa were divided into 3 other groups (the last Central and Southern Africa group only had 12 unique countries in it). It put South Asia together with Central Asia and the Caucasus. Oceania was split between East & Southeast Asia and South America.

All in all, I found it did a much better job than ChatGPT, with only 12 countries missing (all microstates and island nations), repeated 6 countries (and it was frank about most of them), listed two countries as one (Monaco/Liechtenstein, Samoa/Tonga), and included two non-sovereign territories (New Caledonia and French Polynesia). Surprisingly, it did list Taiwan as a country. I think the Communist Party needs to work harder on its censorship 😂.

Overall, this has been a fun exercise. Of course 10 is an arbitrary number, and there are many different ways to cut and dice the countries, for example, (ahem, advertisement time) as in my following quizzes:

• 50 Largest Cities
• 1M Cities
• Top 10 Urban Areas by Region
• Top 5 Cities by UN Geographic Regions

Credits: All maps above are generated from visitedplaces.com. It can do orthographic projection which is my preferred choice. If you have never used it before, do go and check it out.