First, regions are adjacent if they share a boundary segment; two regions that share only isolated boundary points are not considered adjacent. Second, bizarre regions, such as those with finite area but infinitely long perimeter, are not allowed; maps with such regions can require more than four colors. (To be safe, we can restrict to regions whose boundaries consist of finitely many straight line segments. It is allowed that a region entirely surround one or more other regions.) Note that the notion of "contiguous region" (technically: connected open subset of the plane) is not the same as that of a "country" on regular maps, since countries need not be contiguous (e.g., the Cabinda Province as part of Angola, Nakhchivan as part of Azerbaijan, Kaliningrad as part of Russia, and Alaska as part of the United States are not contiguous). If we required the entire territory of a country to receive the same color, then four colors are not always sufficient. For instance, consider a simplified map: