

Interesting concept of generating every image possible - raydar
http://webdevrefinery.com/forums/topic/10917-seeing-everything/

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fridek
If one could write a fit function that returns a value correlated to the
meaning of such random image, some genetic algorithm could be used. Also, this
would be a perfect project to finally nuke copyright on images. Could also
work with random texts, code, etc. Even better, a random piece of code could
be evaluated on a simple "does it compile" basis. Hmm, I better get to work.

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dalke
Along the same lines, read Borges' "The Library of Babel", from 1941.

Quoting from the Wikipedia description: "Despite — indeed, because of — this
glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the
librarians in a state of suicidal despair."

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kolev
Obviously this guy and his readers know nothing about math. Th number of
possible images (400 by 400 with 24-bit color) is in fact
16,777,216^(400*400), which is an outrageously huge number. You can reduce
this slightly by accounting for symmetry.

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LeBleu
I wonder if this would be explorable for some much tinier subset of the space
of images. Like maybe 32 x 32 greyscale JPEG images with some limit on
compressed size that keeps it to interesting images.

I'm specifically suggesting JPEG because it is a compression method based on
human perception, so if we focus only on easily JPEG compressed images, we
should eliminate a lot of the image that look like snow on a TV, and restrict
more to images that look vaguely like something.

Unfortunately, I don't remember enough details of how JPEG compression works
to make a reasonable guess how many possible JPEGs this is, and whether we are
getting into numbers small enough to be feasible.

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LeBleu
A very quick approximation seems to indicate it still isn't feasible. I saved
2 32x32 JPEGs using Gimp at quality 30. One is a cutout of a face from a
photo, the other is random noise generated using the filter in Gimp. The
resulting JPEG files were 427 bytes for the face, and 525 for completely
random.

Now, I have no idea how much of that is the header. So, to help guess that, I
saved a solid white 32px image with the same settings, and it was 164 bytes.

Worst case, generating every possible 427 byte file at one hundred per second,
would take ~ 4.8×10^1008 × universe age (per
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2^%28427*8%29+%2F+100+p...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2^%28427*8%29+%2F+100+per+second+%2F+86400+seconds+per+day))

Even if we figure all 164 bytes of the white file is header info, that leaves
263 bytes of image data in the face image, which would take ~ 5.4×10^613 ×
universe age. (Per
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2^%28263*8%29+%2F+100+p...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2^%28263*8%29+%2F+100+per+second+%2F+86400+seconds+per+day))

If we got down to an 8 by 8 pixel black and white image, and generating 1
billion per second, it would still take 6 centuries. (per
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2^%288*8%29+%2F+1000000...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2^%288*8%29+%2F+1000000000+per+second+%2F+86400+seconds+per+day))

So even a massively reduced version of the problem is still ridiculously
impossible to explore.

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skewsymmetry
A million monkeys indeed...

