I had a weird dream a few nights ago, that I was using a computer
program that told me the future by creating photos.

The principle was this: since all digital images are made up of pixel. Given the width and height of the image, and the number of colors you can calculate how many possible different images you can make.

So, in the dream the program generated all the images possible and showed me all sorts of things that seemed impossible, like photos of real aliens someone will take in my future, and the space craft that crashed in Roswell. Pictures of who really killed Kennedy, photos of future newspaper articles, future art work, future lottery tickets.

Thinking about it now, you could have a program to do that but it would take years to create all the images for such a small area, and even longer to look at them. And then, most of the images would be nonsene, just noise and static. You could filter those I guess.

Also, even if you could see all these 'future' images, there is no telling if they would be acurate or genuine. Would half the images be genuine?

If there are any mathamaticians on here can you answer this: how many unique pictures could you take if the image was 200pixels wide, by 200pixels high and a possible color pallete of 256. This should produce a finite value of images right? Yet, I'm sure you could take infinite amounts of unique photos matching those dimension - I cant make sense of it.

Originally posted by thestruggle
If there are any mathamaticians on here can you answer this: how many unique pictures could you take if the image was 200pixels wide, by 200pixels high and a possible color pallete of 256. This should produce a finite value of images right? Yet, I'm sure you could take infinite amounts of unique photos matching those dimension - I cant make sense of it.

Isn't it just 200 x 200 x 256 (about 10.5 million) ?

actually no, it's not, thats just the possible setting for one pixel, for multiple pixels it must a huge number.

And your not going to get much of a vision in 200 x 200 pixels, thats only 4 times as big as my avatar.

Originally posted by nick2
Isn't it just 200 x 200 x 256 (about 10.5 million) ?

Probably a *lot* more.

200 x 200 = 40,000 pixels

so ...

256 * 256 * 256 * ... (you basically do that 40,000 times).

256 to the power of 40,000 ? ... (may be the correct mathematical notation).

If 200 x 200 x 256 is the number of possible pictures with one pixel being set (10,240,000)

then I guess for two pixels set you could have 20,480,000

for 3 pixels 30,720,000

so for all the pixels you would need 10,240,000 x 40,000

?

(I've only got CSE 4 in maths BTW)



How many pictures could a Cray produce per hour ?
Then you need it to try and spot a meaningfull picture, which might take a while.

Originally posted by nick2
Isn't it just 200 x 200 x 256 (about 10.5 million) ?

actually no, it's not, thats just the possible setting for one pixel, for multiple pixels it must a huge number.

And your not going to get much of a vision in 200 x 200 pixels, thats only 4 times as big as my avatar.

Yeah, 200x200 is not that big, bit any bigger would be really confusing and involve enormous numbers. Maybe I should have done one smaller. Say 16x16 with 256 colors.

That would be:
16x16=256 pixels/sq
256^256 = 3.231700607131100730071487668867e+616 possible images?

Just had another thought. If you could calculate all possible images, could you also do the reverse. Given an image could you work out what its position is in the sequence of numbers. If you could do that, it would be a form of compression wouldnt it? Since you could store the large number as an equation. I guess that's similar to fractal compression, but different.

You've lost me now mate.

:)

Originally posted by thestruggle
Just had another thought. If you could calculate all possible images, could you also do the reverse. Given an image could you work out what its position is in the sequence of numbers. If you could do that, it would be a form of compression wouldnt it? Since you could store the large number as an equation. I guess that's similar to fractal compression, but different.
Umm, it's not compression, it's just storing the image - storing the index number would take as much space as storing all the information ;)

Originally posted by rich951
Umm, it's not compression, it's just storing the image - storing the index number would take as much space as storing all the information ;)

How do you work that out, surely the first index is just 0, which would take up 1 byte (or 1bit depending how you did it), but if you wanted to store the image uncpmpressed it would take 256bytes (if it was 16x16 pixels). When I said you could store the index as an equation, i ment like if you wanted to store the value of pi, you could also express it at 22/7 which would take less space that 3.14159, etc. It all gets to confusing then tho.

But how do you store 0 in one bit without knowing it's the number zero??

Originally posted by rich951
But how do you store 0 in one bit without knowing it's the number zero??

One bit can be two possible values, 0 or 1.

I don't think you get what I mean... It's ok to say that a one-bit number only needs one bit of space, but you can't allocate that space without knowing its value! That's why when you program, you pick a data type dependent on what values it can take - and it will take up as much storage as the maximum value it can be...

Originally posted by rich951
I don't think you get what I mean... It's ok to say that a one-bit number only needs one bit of space, but you can't allocate that space without knowing its value! That's why when you program, you pick a data type dependent on what values it can take - and it will take up as much storage as the maximum value it can be...

Okay, i see what your saying, and I think the smallest data type you can have is 8 bits so i dont think you could store
1 bit in a file. However, im sure you could store and incredible large number as characters. Like in the example about.
The last index in a 16x16 image with 256 colours was
3.231700607131100730071487668867e+616

If you wrote that to a file it would be 36 bytes long. But to hold it as binary, would it take more bytes? Oh god, im confusing
myself again. I think it would.

To represent such a massive chunk of data in 1 bit ...

How would you know the size of the (uncompressed) data ?

A brilliant title of a thread turns out to be a load of old guff. Mods can we please relocate this to the nerds gallery (http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=46) . This is so not general chit chat and more like nerdy beardy weirdy PC megabitey ****ey! It should be moved!!:rant:

Some people have WAY TOO MUCH TIME on their hands! lol

;)

I once dreamt that I could see far into the mists of the future...

Then I woke up and had my cornflakes.

Originally posted by Jamie
To represent such a massive chunk of data in 1 bit ...

How would you know the size of the (uncompressed) data ?

No, I was saying that you could store an index in 1 bit (ok, so you would only have two values 0 and 1 so not much of an index, but you could create two images of any given size). To store a whole image you would need the width and height and the color pallette.

Originally posted by thestruggle
No, I was saying that you could store an index in 1 bit (ok, so you would only have two values 0 and 1 so not much of an index, but you could create two images of any given size). To store a whole image you would need the width and height and the color pallette.

yep i know ... i was refering to the index .........

I'm with miniminch on this one! Does anyone know what on earth this discussion is about?

Despite such an interesting topic title, the discussion bears no resemblance to what the thread intimated was to follow! :shocked:

Any chance thestruggle can be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act? :suspect:

I don't even know where I am.