SamTherapy opened this issue on Jun 13, 2010 · 28 posts
bagginsbill posted Mon, 14 June 2010 at 8:43 AM
Quote - Answer: Why not?
It's doable and it'd be interesting to see just what would pop out in a reasonable amount of time. I'd be able to see the long lost pictures my dad painted for me when I was a kid, for one thing.
Sadly, the numbers involved are seriously big. Even a grid of 8 x 8 pixels has 18446744073709551616 possible combinations in black and white.
While you got the right value for 64 pixels (8 x 8) you have not seemed to grasp the significance of exponential growth.
You mentioned an 800 x 800 image. Let's consider only one ROW of that image.
That single-pixel wide row of 800 pixels, assuming only black and white possible states for each, has the following number of different possibilities:
6.68 * 10 ^ 240
That's a number with 240 DIGITS. And that is for ONE ROW.
To help you understand how big that is, the age of the universe, in seconds is only an 18 digit number. This number is 240 digits. And it is just one row.
Are you beginning to see the scale yet?
Current estimates of the number of ATOMS in the universe vary between 10 ^ 80 up to about 10^83.
Suppose you were magically able to demand that the universe start over, that every ATOM in it is an image renderer, and that every ATOM was working to produce 1 trillion images per second. Then given the current age of the universe, the number of images generated so far by the entire enslaved universe would be about 10^113.
Yet, a single row of 800 pixels has 10^240 possible states. The ratio of done versus not done is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. If each atom were an entire enslaved universe, and all were running in parallel, we'd still not have produced all the images possible in 800 pixels (one row). They would all mostly consist of black pixels yet.
Now consider that there are 800 rows in an 800 by 800 image.
I can't even begin to tell you how big that number is.
No, this is not doable at all.
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