I have been watching the development of this for a while, and I don't think that the algorithm has been tailored towards the test cases at all. The file format

I have been watching the development of this for a while, and I don't think that the algorithm has been tailored towards the test cases at all. The file format is extremely general (vertices forming polygons, color, alpha and blur per vertex). It's been fed anything and everything from around the net, but it takes so many days of computation to make the images look good that only a few examples were used in the article itself. If anything, Mona Lisa and Lena were specifically chosen to be hard for a system like this to compress (fine brush detail does not mix well n sided polygons). Blur for example compensates for the shortcomings of polygon rendering to make the whole system more general purpose.