make a photo instead of take a photo

[s00pcan]

Ok I just had a crazy idea.. Digital images are just lines of 1's and 0's right? So by generating every combination of them you could get a picture of anything. That just blows my mind thinking about it. Of course, there are trillions of possible combinations for a 8bit 640x480 image, but it has to be possible.

[Jesper]

Well, it might be possible in theory, but not in practice. Think about how many combinations there are. Let's make it even more conservative than 640 x 480 and leave out color. Suppose we would want to generate all possible 320 x 240 grayscale images (8 bits per pixel).

So there are 256 possibilities for every pixel and there are 320 x 240 = 76,800 pixels. The number of different possible images is 256 to the power of 76,800 which is an incredibly huge number with more than 180,000 digits !!! So "trillions" is an enormous understatement. The number is much larger than the number of protons in the entire universe, so you can forget ever building a computer that could generate all those images.

[Jemmind]

Maybe if we lived in the Matrix :)
Julie

[shniks]

Interesting concept - but I can imagine it would look like a colourful mess if you randomly entered all the 0's and 1's in. I wonder if there was a computer out there that would randomly select these numbers to create random pictures, and if in one instance the picture would come out looking like something? Weird..

[Jesper]

Almost all of the images would look like the static on your television screen when there's no channel selected. Because there's such an infinite huge number of possible images, it will be impossibly difficult to find any interesting image. But somewhere in between all those pictures with just noise, there is an image of you with a green head, three eyes and blue hair..... :D

[Drbeagle]

Perhaps in 200 years, when computers are much, much, much, much, much, much, much, and did I mention much more powerful, instead of taking photos we'll simply order them.

You'll go down to the studio and say you'd like a picture of yourself on the moon, and the computer will pull out of its catalog of all possible images, the one that looks like you jumping on the moon. Sweet!!! :roll:

David

[Penguin_101_1]

This is powerful:


IBM to Build Supercomputer for U.S. Military
Tue Jul 27, 2004 12:04 AM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM Corp. (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said it had been selected to build a supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Defense that would be used by the military for war simulation, weather forecasting and other applications.
The computer will be deployed at the Naval Oceanographic Office Major Shared Resource Center in Mississippi, IBM said.

IBM did not disclose the exact financial terms of the deal but said it was valued in tens of millions of dollars.

The supercomputer consists of 368 powerful computers connected together with a total of about 3,000 64-bit microprocessors made by IBM. The supercomputer would run on IBM's Unix operating system -- the AIX.

"This is a race horse," said Debra Goldfarb, vice president of strategy and products for IBM's Deep Computing unit. She said the purchase shows IBM's commitment to building powerful and sophisticated computers for the Defense Department."

The system will perform at a peak speed of 20 teraflops, or 20 trillion mathematical operations per second. That means the supercomputer will be able to accomplish in just one second what it would take a person with a calculator 1.2 million years.

IBM expects the computer to be ranked among the world's 10 fastest computers when the next list of the top 500 computers is released.

The Top 500 list of fastest computers is compiled and published twice a year by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany).

The fastest computer, according to the most recent list, was the Earth Simulator Center in Japan made by NEC Corp. (6701.T: Quote, Profile, Research)

8)

Can I get that as a laptop?

[s00pcan]

It would probably be just as hard to store the images as it is to make them, since you'd have to make so many and then look through all of them.

[vfilby]

It is a cool thought, if only I knew a stoned photographer to spring that one on.

It is highly improbable by the strict calculations of Jesper; however you can easily trim the number down, by eliminating certain possibilities. For instance when you take a picture it generally consits of objects, these objects or regions are generally one colour, there will be slight deviations in hue and definite deviations in Value (lightness). This would apply to all items in a photo, it is not often that you see a photo that looks like static. Applying methodologies like this would greatly reduce the problem space, although not enough by far! You could probably also reduce the problem space further by having the computer generate images using basic photog. principles such as the rule of thirds. The problem space would still be way to big!

The problem space would be too big to evaluate manually so you would have to use computer analysis. You could use genetic algorithms to 'evolve' cool images but you will need to have some way to teach the computer to appreciate fine art: no easy task!

I am not trying to prove that it is possible or that Jesper is on crack, because it certainly is a tough problem; albeit an interesting one. Just trying to add my $.02.

Vince

[Jesper]

I am not trying to prove that it is possible or that Jesper is on crack, because it certainly is a tough problem; albeit an interesting one. Just trying to add my $.02.

Huh?! :o Yes, I live in the Netherlands, but drugs are not legal here (also soft drugs aren't, contrary to what many people think) and certainly hard drugs are not freely available.... :roll:

I just did a simple calculation to show that it will never be possible to generate all possible images.... you'd need a computer which is much, much larger than the entire universe to generate and store all those images...

Even when you make the problem much smaller, there are far too many possibilities. Suppose you want to generate all possible 100 x 100 pixel images (the size of the avatars on this forum). Suppose you'll only take 4 bits per pixel (16 levels of gray). The number of possibilities would be 16 ^ (100 x 100) = 16 ^ 10,000. That's still a number with more than 12,000 digits, which is still far more than the number of elementary particles in the universe...... :shock:

[vfilby]

To clarify: I thought you were mostly correct (ie you are not on crack or otherwise out of your mind), the problem is in general to tough to be tackled. I was just trying to show that that the problem could be simplified to be much smaller than the raw Height X Width X Depth calculation.

And they do have genetic algorithms that use volunteer input to determine aesthetically pleasing images and 'evolve' better ones based on the input. So this work is actually being done.

To summarize: the problem is easier tackled when you don't take the brute force approach. If you reduce the problem space to a computable size then the problem can be tackled.

And as an aside, I am currently sitting about 100 feet from a super computer that was just recently pushed off the Top 500 list ;-) Can anbody say parallel mp3 encoding ;-) or perhaps batch image processing ;-)

[Steveo31]

This thread remids me of the movie "Airplane"... when the press is in the Airport control room, and one guy says, "ok guys, lets take some pictures". They go around the room and take photos off the walls and walk out.

LOL!!