I wanted to resurrect this beautiful thread because I was recently thinking about something that I posted here earlier, and realized my rather epic calculation error:
daedaloops wrote:on a basic digital image of 256x256 pixels there's 16 million color choices for each pixel, so about 1 TRILLION different choices on how the picture could be formed. And that's just a very small digital image, now let's think about reality..
You obviously can't count that just by multiplying them together, you count that by taking the amount of colors to the power of the pixels, so 16000000^(256*256) which is about 10^472129. So my calculation was off by 472117 zeros, no biggie.... As a comparison there is "only" about 10^80 atoms in the currently known universe.
Now that makes a hell of a lot more sense because if you think about it, on that digital image there would be displayed EVERY SINGLE THING IN THE UNIVERSE from EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE AND SITUATION. So somewhere in there would be an image of every nexian having sex with dead clowns, or any other crazy shit you could possibly think of. (dont ask why I just thought of that..)
Now obviously a major part of that would be just meaningless static, because essentially it's the same thing as assigning all the pixels randomly. But just the IDEA that that is a finite number and somewhere in there IS INDEED every single thing you could imagine, makes my little head go round and round.. Inspired by this I decided to code
a little generator that does exactly that, assigns pixels randomly with a selected resolution and colorspace. So yes, that MIGHT display a very pixelated version of Mona Lisa, but it probably won't since the chances for that are the same as winning in the lottery a few thousand times in a row.. But it's interesting to play around with that and look at the fuzzy patterns that sometimes form with the lower resolutions zoomed in.
Also on a slightly more off-topic note, I had yet another idea to code a program that produces those same random images and saves them to the disk every second, then you can put your laptop under your pillow and drink a big dose of ayahuasca and lay your head on the pillow. It will be extremely interesting to see if there are any noticeable anomalies in the patterns, as people have already reported that DMT can create some electrical weirdness around you. So that's what I'm gonna do tonight, if there are any interesting results I will post them here somewhere along with the program. *fingers crossed*