Generating all possible pictures
May 31, 2008
Think of an image of 800 x 600 pixel and 24 bit of color (8 bit per each RGB component). Its trivial binary representation is a sequence of 11520000 bits (800 x 600 x 24) and we can think of each picture as being a natural number.
Imagine now that we write an computer program that generates all these pictures one by one, incrementing the natural number by one in each round.
Running this algorithm for enough time you would eventually get:
- a picture of your face
- a picture of you in the Moon
- a picture of you with Marlin Monroe and James Dean
- pictures of ancient Earth, with dinosaurs
- pictures of all the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh or Picasso
- pictures of all the pages of Shakespeare’s writings
- pictures of proofs of all relevant mathematical theorems (already proved or not)
- pictures of all great music compositions (already written or not)
- pictures of Microsoft Office and Windows source code
- pictures/printscreens of all pages in the World Wide Web, including all the versions of Wikipedia
Warning: don’t do this at home unless you can wait for some billion years between each pair of interesting pictures you would get!
Still, it’s interesting to realize that you can compress all the world’s information to a short and trivial program, all you have to do is add enough useless data to it!