Topic awaiting preservation: EveryIcon

http://www.numeral.com/appletsoftware/eicon.html

I don't know how many of you have seen this before (it's been around since '97), I first saw it a couple months ago. Basically, this guy wrote a program to compute exery possible 32x32x1 image possible. The hitch is this: there are 1.797x10E308 (2^1024) possible icons. The first line (32 pixels) took over a year to compute every possibility... the second line (total 64 pixels) will take 5.85 billion (yes, billion) years to compute every possibility. Those are just the first two lines! The entire image would take eons to compute at it's current (100 updates/sec) speed.

However, when you factor in Moore's law, it probably would be quite finished in a few decades.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently arcane magic is indistinguishable from technology." -- P. David Lebling

(Edited by Iron Wallaby on 10-16-2004 04:52)

I started to work on a project like that about fifteen years agao, but when I realized that there would be more icons that there are particles in the universe, I decided to abandon the project. It seems to me that most of the results would not be particularly interesting anyway.

-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

I wonder if an interesting next step would be to use some sort of pattern-classification algorithm to keep pictures that only have some interest?

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently arcane magic is indistinguishable from technology." -- P. David Lebling

That would be a start, but then you consider that there are 261120 icons consisting of a solid color with one dot different. 261120 compared to 1.797x10E308 is a very small number so you have to come up with a huge number of rules to get rid of un-interesting icons. It would be better find a rule that will get rid of more than 1x10E300 icons at a time. Those kinds of rules are hard to find.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try it. I just got discouraged when I realized the magnitude of the numbers involved and left the project. If you have the time to work on the project, it would be interesting to see how many ways you can reduce the number of icons you have to calculate to a manageable number.

Keep in mind this is like the "Reckoner of Sands" problem. It's also related to the "Infinite Number of Monkeys" problem. I think it also relates to the "Tower of Hanoi" and the "Ten Billion Names of God".

-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.