"Every Picture Ever" TV now a reality

Check this out - if 8x8 pixels represents a 64-bit binary number...

That's 2^64 permutations of pixels...or 18 billion billion different combinations. If you were to store each one of these images as a binary, it would be something like...140 million terabytes of data. Unless I got my mental math completely wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me if I did!

I don't even want to attempt thinking about the math for how long these permutations would take to display at 30 frames per second, but its probably millions of years. If we did a 1920x1080 pixel display with RGB color, I think the sun would burn out AND we would have another Big Bang before we got through them all.

It's sort of like the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

8*8, monochromatic at 30 fps will take 19'498'080'365 years to finish. That's probably enough.

Where's my 60 FPS? That would take only 10 billion years to render!

lol

This is great.

@mb: If this 8x8 display was doing colour using red, green and blue values with a range of 256, it'd take about 2500000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years to display every possible permutation at its current rate of 30fps. 1920*1080 would be totally unfathomable. The number of zeroes would probably be totally unfathomable.

It's literally every 8x8 griddler puzzle (nonogram, picross, etc.) that could ever exist.

This seriously should be a permanent exposition at Pompidou in Paris. I'm serious.

@fear_the_booboo: this actually has been done before, and in larger scale, and has been in museums or technical displays. I'm trying to remember the name of the guy who did it - it's been years.

It was essentially this exact thing, just driving a bunch of physical monitors in an array. Python script that used bit shifting to go through each possible bit pattern in order. I think the project is on permanent display somewhere, I just can't recall right now. Someone here will know.

Technology!

@mb: Ah cool! If you find where I'd be super interested to know. Studying art and whatnot. (I won't get into a modern art debate here though).

Anyway, this is awesome. This community is great.

Any images show up? Hitler make an appearance?

noooooooo I need Unity Web Player now I'll never know the glory of the panoptitron at work!

Is this akin to that oil drop experiment?

This is just great.

Pretty damn fantastic =]

VinCo products are about as functional and safe as RobCo products.

Vinny Caravella is the 3M of bad ideas.

This is a great idea.

Next up we'll have someone put up numbers from 1 to 100,000,000,000 on a webpage. That could be doable.

This magic webpage will include most lottery number combinations that will ever be drawn, everyone' social security number, the birth date of your child, your death date and Emma Watson's cellphone number.

Joking aside, I'm extremely happy someone made this. It's fucking awesome.

Yeah about 19 billion years is my calculation. It's actually good to have done that math because it really puts into perspective how fucking incomprehensibly long it would take for a 1920x1080 panel switching between RGB to finish. This of course assumes we're only talking about display, let alone storage of those images. Even if one stored the "interesting" ones, then who knows how many countless billions of raw screen captures would need to be accounted for.

Still though, I'm super glad this exists.

At some point, this will spell "C*NT", won't it?

When will it reach 1%?

Also, I'm waiting for it to show a space invader.

I'm getting reports... yes, we can now confirm that this is totally nuts.

@funkys: If it will take 19 billion years for 100% then I think 190 million years for it to get to 1%. Does that sound right? Math!

@mb: according to my calculation: 2^64 possible images / (30 Frames per second * 60 seconds per minute * 60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day * 365.25 days per year) = 19,484,734,869.7 years

This gonna take a long time.

infinite jest is now a reality.

But let's say that 40-50 years down the future, we have a computers strong enough to process a 480x640 image with RGB color, but not at slow 30 or 60 frames, but maybe at 1 million frames a second. The video image wouldn't be meant for anyone to view live, but instead, the each image would be processed by one hundred other computers that had object recognition software (similar to how image software can track faces in photos). The storage for all the images would be insane, but the computers with object recognition would only process and save images that they could recognize to have recognizable objects, animals, shapes etc. - the rest, it would delete.

In the end, you would have a set of an extremely large number of images - but all of which are more relevant for humans.

Would something like this be possible at all?

At ~0.00000000000024%, this is the only time we will see low mountain ranges and plains in 8-bit style. Enjoy it while it lasts.

This website and community are so dumb and fantastic. This is great!

EVERY THOUSAND YEARS

THIS METAL SPHERE

TEN TIMES THE SIZE OF JUPITER

FLOATS JUST A FEW YARDS PAST THE EARTH...

EVERY THOUSAND YEARS

THIS METAL SPHERE

TEN TIMES THE SIZE OF JUPITER

FLOATS JUST A FEW YARDS PAST THE EARTH...

Is this science?

Alright, so what if we did this for a 1080p, 32bit color screen?

The number of combinations would be 2^(1920*1080*32) which is approximately 10^19,974,905. That number is so mind numbingly high we cannot even comprehend. So what are the chances that, if we completely random generated these frames, we could see something familiar to us rather than nonsensical noise?

Let's say for the argument that a person lives for 70 years. That person over the course of his life registers 70*365*24*3,600*30 = 66,225,600,000 frames at 30 fps. That's assuming that all of these frames are unique and the person never sleeps and never closes his eye. According to the latest estimations about 115 billion humans ever lived on this planet. That is 7,615,944,000,000,000,000,000 different frames, assuming that every person lived 70 years, which is again a vast overestimation.

We should go even further. Let's say that there are planets with intelligent life orbiting every star in the universe, and all of these planets had the same number of people as Earth and they all lived 70 years. That's not even remotely close to the truth, but whatever. There are approx. 10^24 stars in the observable universe, so that makes ~7.6 * 10^45 different frames that we could watch and get a glimpse into the history of intelligent life all over the universe. That seems like a lot, but it's essentially nothing to the sheer number of different combinations.

@vinny suggested that we parallelize the process. Let's make a bunch of Panoptitrons and set them up so that they all generate frames that the others are not. Let's in fact make 10^80 Panoptitrons (that's about the number of atoms in our universe) and run them parallel until the heat death of our universe, which is estimated at 10^1,000 years. This bunch of machines can sift through 9.46 * 10^1,088 images at 30 frames per second. This all means that over the whole life of our universe, with uniform distribution, there's only a 1 to 10^19,973,770 chance that one of the machines capture such a "Point of View" picture. This chance is essentially zero, all this parallelization barely made a dent in that huge number.

It's late here, so forgive me if this napkin math doesn't check out.

Oh my god, Now I want to make one of those 90's Videophile dens that are just filled with CRTs receiving all sorts of god knows what, in the center would be this, I can almost hear the 15.625kHz hum. . . .

If you're responsible, you're a wonderful person.

This is how VinnCo opens a doorway to the Event Horizon dimension or something.

The screen is blank. Is there supposed to be something showing?

So how long would it take to view every possible sequence of animation of those images? My apologies in advance for the melting minds trying to wrap their head around that.

Yeah, keeps crashing for me. Unfortunate - I wanted to see every image that had ever been created or will be created.

I am not a mathematician, but:

Unique arrangements of distinct things are called permutations. To compute the number of permutations, imagine a tree of decisions about the ordering that needs to be made. Let's use an example of 10 frames of animation.

1. You need to decide which of the 10 frames goes first. There are 10 options.
2. For the second frame in the sequence, you only have 9 options to choose from (the first one was already picked, and all the items in the sequence need to be unique). So far, that means there are 90 possible choices for the first two frames.
3. For the third frame in the sequence, you have 8 options remaining.
4. and so on.

For 10 frames, there are 10 * 9 * 8 * 7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 = 3628800 possible sequences. This operation is called the factorial, and it's the ! or x! key on your calculator. In our example, 10! = 3628800.

The factorial operator is crazy; crazier than the exponential operator that you use to compute the number of images. For instance, let's compare 2^x and x!.

• 2^64, which is the number of 8 x 8 images that exist, is a nice friendly number around 18,000,000,000,000,000,000.
• 64!, on the other hand, is 130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is much, much, much bigger.

All possible sequences, if strung together, would result in an animation 18,000,000,000,000,000,000! frames long. I'm not going to apply that factorial and write it out; just check out the Wolfram Alpha page.

We can do bigger.

The above calculations were for the PANOPTITRON, with it's 8 by 8 monochrome display. It's kind of a joke, to demonstrate that even with such a limited search space, the number of combinations is insane. ... but what if we went back to the HD screen with full colour depth? How many permutations of all the HD images are there?

So to be clear, we'd be talking about every possible image, watched in every possible sequence. That means that every movie ever (as long as it doesn't contain exact frame duplicates) will exist in there (and because no movies are 19 billion years long, each movie would actually appear many, many times. eg: the one sequence where Boogie Nights starts at frame 0, the one sequence where Boogie Nights starts at frame 1, and so on). There would also be, of course, every movie that would ever be, or even could be. Want to watch a century-long long documentary about people having sex with cars? It's in there. What about the same thing but it's set on the moon? Sure. Any possible sequence of images. (Again, as long as there are no exact repeat frames, but with full colour depth that's not going to be a problem.)

In this case, if you strung all the sequences together, the number of total frames would be ( 2^(1920 x 1080 x 3 x 8) )!

This number is so big, it can't be expressed in decimal notation. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the value of the number, I'm talking about just writing down the number itself. Without scientific notation or anything, if you tried to write this number, even if each digit were a single atom, you'd run out of atoms in the universe. To write it down.

By a long shot.

The traditional "can't even write this down lol not enough atoms" number is the googolplex, and that's 10-to-the-10-to-the-100. Our number is 10-to-the-10-to-the-about-fifteen-million.

So anyway, it would take a while.

the pixles are stuck on my screen on my laptop...

I wonder how long it'll take before someone sets up a stream on a dedicated PC for everyone to see. This seems to be a locally running program that'll reset as soon as I close the browser window (Haven't tried though, too enthralled by this.)

This could be the UVB-76 of our generation. Perpetually broadcasting around the world.

Where VinnCo's going, we don't need eyes.

That looks like the most pointless way to spend time and let you life slip through your fingers...

God bless you, man.

This is super rad.