When I was nine I was playing with BASIC and wrote a simple program that would enumerate all colors of all pixels on the screen. I wanted to see all possible im

When I was nine I was playing with BASIC and wrote a simple program that would enumerate all colors of all pixels on the screen. I wanted to see all possible images "fly by" so to speak. First I got frustrated because it was running so slowly, only then I started to think... If I can display a picture of a car on this monitor, then that picture would eventually also show up 'by chance' with my program! Mind blown. Then I realized it would have to show every picture in the world eventually, because every picture in the world could be displayed on my monitor. Mind blown again. Then I realized it would display every book in the world also, because a picture of a page of text is just another picture. Whoa. Then I realized the monitor would also eventually display all things that happened in the past that we had no records of and everything that was going to happen in the future! Of course I couldn't grasp exactly how long the program was going to take, but I realized that if it had to go through infinitely many pictures it would have to take infinitely long to run. But now I can do the real math. Should be fun: Display 60 frames per second. 3600 seconds in an hour, 85000 in a day, 31 million seconds in a year. So 1860 million images per year. How many possible pictures are there? 640 x 480 x 16 bits = 0.5 MB frame buffer. Kilobyte is 10 bits, megabyte is 20 bits. So there are 2 ^ 20 bits and each bit we have to toggle so there are 2 ^ (2 ^ 20) combinations. 1860 million combinations ~ 30 bits. Since we have 2 ^ 20 bits worth of statespace those 30 bits are completely insignificant. So let's assume there are a billion people with a billion computers each who work on the problem in parallel. Then there are 2 ^ (30 * 3) = 2 ^ 100 images processed each year. This still doesn't make any difference! 2 ^ 30 - 100 bits = 2 ^ 30 bits. It would take over 10 ^ 300000 years for a billion people with a billion computers each that process 60 frames per second to enumerate the different values of a 640 x 480 monitor. And that's just for a single megabyte. Mind blown.