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Fractal Art => Other Artforms => Topic started by: Kimmo on November 13, 2007, 08:24:52 PM




Title: Pictures of everything
Post by: Kimmo on November 13, 2007, 08:24:52 PM
A couple of years ago or so, I heard someone come out with an awesome idea; imagine an app that simply ran through all the permutations of pixel colour for an image of say, 512x512x12bpp...

You could prolly have it just run through all the permutations as you watch, depending on how quick it was (obviously it'd have to be very much quicker than the refresh rate)... though it'd prolly take way too long, and you'd want it to save every 1,000,000th image or whatever, that didn't have more than a certain amount of chaos, for later review and exploration to each side (in the possibility space) of interesting snapshots, and just leave it to run...

I don't suppose anyone's gone and written such an app? It'd be good for chewing up HDD space at least; every combination of that sized image would soak up around 90TB...


Title: Re: Pictures of everything
Post by: lycium on November 13, 2007, 10:59:11 PM
3145728! is a big number. consider:

2! =       2
3! =       6
4! =       24
5! =       120
6! =       720
7! =       5040
8! =       40320
9! =       362880
10! =       3628800
15! =       1307674368000
20! =       2432902008176640000
25! =       15511210043330985984000000
50! =       3.04140932... * 10^64
70! =       1.19785717... * 10^100
450! =       1.73336873... * 10^1,000
3249! =    6.41233768... * 10^10,000
25206! =    1.205703438... * 10^100,000
100000! =    2.8242294079... * 10^456,573

that last number has 456 thousand zeroes after it, and 100000! cannot even begin to approach 3145728!.

so, let's assume that you can watch these images at a rate of several trillion frames per second - in so doing defying the laws of physics which allow the electrons in your brain to actually register the images, let alone those in the computer to compute and display them - then it will still take impossibly many times the lifetime of the universe to see them all.

...

no, no one has written this program yet ;) there used to be a website called "is it god?" which displayed random images and asked the user if it was god or just a bunch of tv static.


Title: Re: Pictures of everything
Post by: David Makin on November 14, 2007, 02:03:32 AM
Putting it another way.....
If you want every possible image then it requires 4096^(512*512) images

consider 4096 colours in a 1*1 image == 4096 images (==4096^(1*1))
consider 4096 colours in a 2*1 image == 4096^2 images (==4096^(2*1))
consider 4096 colours in a 2*2 image == 4096^4 images (==4096^(2*2))
etc.

Even a 32*32 pixel block in two colours would produce 2^(32*32) i.e. 2^1024 images, assuming a bit per pixel that's 128*2^1024 bytes = 2^1031 bytes of data, or 2^1001 GB