8 ms·

Back in the day I worked for Atari, writing game cartridges for their line of home computers. I had a decent relationship with marketing and had developed a rep

by kabdib 7y ago

Back in the day I worked for Atari, writing game cartridges for their line of home computers. I had a decent relationship with marketing and had developed a reputation as one of the more helpful geeks. One fine day a marketing guy knocked on my door and asked: "What would it take to print out every possible eight-by-eight bitmap? We want to copyright them so our competition can't use them." Seriously. So I told him the story about the king who wanted to reward the inventor of chess, and upon being asked what he wanted the inventor said "one grain of wheat for the first square, two for the second, four for the third..." I thought a bit, and added "I think that printout would outweigh the planet." He went away. I was not a helpful geek that day. Later I realized that I had only considered black-and-white bitmaps, and that preempting copyright on color bitmaps would have meant a lot more planets. There's got to be a Douglas Adams style tie-in here somewhere involving aliens with planet-chewer-uppers invading and taking Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and then us for some cockamamie copyright scheme in another galaxy . . .

syntheticnature 7y ago
Once, a guy at a bar told me he wanted to do a similar thing: displaying a 100x100 image that changed once a second to run through all possible bitmaps. He didn't believe me when I told him that doing so would exceed the the lifespan of the planet (to say nothing of what state the universe would be in).
- tripzilch 7y ago
  What I find useful when explaining people how long some very long count will take, is to tell them that 1 billion seconds lasts about 30 years, or that counting to a billion takes about 30 years[0]. Not sure if it would have helped with your guy, of course, but it generally provides some insight :) [0] I wonder about estimating that time, many numbers may take longer than a second to even pronounce.
  - olooney 7y ago
    Beholding the Big Bang, 2009, by Arthur Ganson A series of 12 pairs of reduction gears, each at a 50:1 ratio. On the left, a motor spins at a high rpm; on the right, the drive shaft is embedded into a concrete block. It will be 13.7 billion years before the final gear completes a single rotation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCA2whpMCno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCA2whpMCno
    - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
      I wonder what the system as a whole is rated to. I suspect the motor will give out within another decade. I doubt that the system used a super long life motor, but I could be very wrong.
      - amichal 7y ago
        This is at the MIT museum. I first saw it as a child decades ago and many times sense. The motor has been visibly replaced/refurbed and I'm sure they turn it off at night. All that said, when you see the first gear or two zipping around and stand there and stare at the Nth gear trying to see any movement at all it really drives home how these things scale. As a kid I once watched it for over an hour to see if could see ANY movement in the first gear that looked still.
    - nkrisc 7y ago
      While rationally I understand how it works, it just seems to strange that so much movement can so easily be effectively nullified.
  - kevinventullo 7y ago
    I recently celebrated my billionth second :)
    - effingwewt 7y ago
      Haha, nice! Here's to the next billion seconds! This is now my favorite way to tally life~
jniedrauer 7y ago
I tried calculating this number for 16-bit images in Python (8^8^16), and the interpreter just froze. Go was pretty quick though: 3.940200619639448e+115
- DeusExMachina 7y ago
  For scale, there are an estimated 10^80 atoms in the entire universe.
- esoterica 7y ago
  Neither of those numbers are correct. Firstly, exponentiation is right associative so 8^8^16 ≠ (8^8)^16 ≈ 3.94e+115. Secondly, that number is wrong anyway. The correct number is (2^16)^(8*8).
  - jniedrauer 7y ago
    Yeah apparently each pixel of a 16-bit image can have 256 different colors. Oops.
    - messe 7y ago
      That's an 8-bit image. Each pixel of a 16-bit image could have 2^16 = 65536 possible colours.
      - jniedrauer 7y ago
        I give up. I shouldn't post before having coffee.
- hansvm 7y ago
  Python is probably trying to compute it exactly.
- ericfrederich 7y ago
  Not sure where that math came from. 16 bit 8 by 8 pixel image would be 16^(8x8) or in Python... print(f"{16 ** (8*8):.4E}") 1.1579E+77 EDIT: I calculated 16 color, not 16 bit. Disregard Python wanted to use a float to convert to exponential format but it overflowed. Need to use strings ;-) n=(2**16)**(8*8); s=str(n); print(s[0] + '.' + s[1:6] + 'E+' + str(len(s) - 1)) 1.79769E+308
audunw 7y ago
Most of the generated images would just be noise though. You could probably be more clever than just generating random images, and have a decent chance of generating something that someone would design. These days you could use neural networks, but obviously that wasn’t feasible then
ninju 7y ago
A small tangent over to describing how many different permutations you can have with deck of cards Taken from https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.
mooman219 7y ago
An 8 by 8 bitmap has 64 pixels. there are 2^64 possible configurations of bitmaps, or 18,446,744,100,000,000,000. Your average printer can print at 600 dots per inch^2. A4 paper is 11.69in by 8.27in, with an area of 96.6763in^2. You can fit 58005.78 dots on an A4 paper assuming you can print on the edges, double that for both sides at 116011.56 dots. Ignoring actually fitting the bitmaps on the paper, you can store 1812 bitmaps per sheet of paper. You can roughly fit all possible combinations of bitmaps on 10,176,500,000,000,000 sheets of paper. Typical office paper weighs 5 grams. Ignoring the weight of ink, your total mass of paper would be 50,882,500,000,000 kilograms of paper. Pluto weighs vastly more at 13,090,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. You definitely don't need a planet's mass worth of paper, but maybe a couple of planets worth of production however. We'd be more likely to see planet scale enslavement in a Douglas Adams galaxy wide copyright mockery scheme, which galactic court would likely throw out since they don't appreciate mockeries of law, leaving everyone a bit disappointed and with entirely too much visibly grey paper.
- kabdib 7y ago
  (chuckles) Now, for the colored bitmaps case, how much does the ink cost? :-) We're also ignoring some edge effects, where bitmaps can be "shared" by sweeping an 8x8 frame across a printed page at the level of pixels to generate the patterns. I don't know how to think about the scale of that problem right now, don't even know if it's easy to do optimally or wickedly difficult, or if Knuth has a solution somewhere in Vol 4 . . .
  - mooman219 7y ago
    A black ink HP 64XL cartridge can print 600 pages assuming a 5% page coverage of ink per page. We're actually coverage roughly 50% per page, and we do that on both sides, so we can only effectively print 30 pages with our HP 64XL cartridge. The cartridge costs about $40. We can expect to spend around $407,060,000,000,000,000 on printer ink for this endeavor, but HP might consider a bulk rate at that point. The global world product is roughly $77,868,000,000,000. If we all unite under this noble cause (and assume no economies of scale), we can payoff the cost of the ink in only 5227 and a half years, assuming paper is free (which it totally is, it grows on tress!). If someone works out how much carbon this captures, we might prevent further global warming to troll domestic courts.
yellowapple 7y ago
You could've settled for every 4×4 bitmap, of which there are only 65,536 black and white ones. Then you could claim any 8×8 bitmap as a derivative work (by concatenation/aggregation/whatever) of up to four of your 4×4 bitmaps.

by kabdib 7y ago

syntheticnature 7y ago

Once, a guy at a bar told me he wanted to do a similar thing: displaying a 100x100 image that changed once a second to run through all possible bitmaps. He didn't believe me when I told him that doing so would exceed the the lifespan of the planet (to say nothing of what state the universe would be in).

tripzilch 7y ago
What I find useful when explaining people how long some very long count will take, is to tell them that 1 billion seconds lasts about 30 years, or that counting to a billion takes about 30 years[0]. Not sure if it would have helped with your guy, of course, but it generally provides some insight :) [0] I wonder about estimating that time, many numbers may take longer than a second to even pronounce.
- olooney 7y ago
  Beholding the Big Bang, 2009, by Arthur Ganson A series of 12 pairs of reduction gears, each at a 50:1 ratio. On the left, a motor spins at a high rpm; on the right, the drive shaft is embedded into a concrete block. It will be 13.7 billion years before the final gear completes a single rotation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCA2whpMCno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCA2whpMCno
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    I wonder what the system as a whole is rated to. I suspect the motor will give out within another decade. I doubt that the system used a super long life motor, but I could be very wrong.
    - amichal 7y ago
      This is at the MIT museum. I first saw it as a child decades ago and many times sense. The motor has been visibly replaced/refurbed and I'm sure they turn it off at night. All that said, when you see the first gear or two zipping around and stand there and stare at the Nth gear trying to see any movement at all it really drives home how these things scale. As a kid I once watched it for over an hour to see if could see ANY movement in the first gear that looked still.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    While rationally I understand how it works, it just seems to strange that so much movement can so easily be effectively nullified.
- kevinventullo 7y ago
  I recently celebrated my billionth second :)
  - effingwewt 7y ago
    Haha, nice! Here's to the next billion seconds! This is now my favorite way to tally life~

jniedrauer 7y ago

I tried calculating this number for 16-bit images in Python (8^8^16), and the interpreter just froze. Go was pretty quick though: 3.940200619639448e+115

DeusExMachina 7y ago
For scale, there are an estimated 10^80 atoms in the entire universe.
esoterica 7y ago
Neither of those numbers are correct. Firstly, exponentiation is right associative so 8^8^16 ≠ (8^8)^16 ≈ 3.94e+115. Secondly, that number is wrong anyway. The correct number is (2^16)^(8*8).
- jniedrauer 7y ago
  Yeah apparently each pixel of a 16-bit image can have 256 different colors. Oops.
  - messe 7y ago
    That's an 8-bit image. Each pixel of a 16-bit image could have 2^16 = 65536 possible colours.
    - jniedrauer 7y ago
      I give up. I shouldn't post before having coffee.
hansvm 7y ago
Python is probably trying to compute it exactly.
ericfrederich 7y ago
Not sure where that math came from. 16 bit 8 by 8 pixel image would be 16^(8x8) or in Python... print(f"{16 ** (8*8):.4E}") 1.1579E+77 EDIT: I calculated 16 color, not 16 bit. Disregard Python wanted to use a float to convert to exponential format but it overflowed. Need to use strings ;-) n=(2**16)**(8*8); s=str(n); print(s[0] + '.' + s[1:6] + 'E+' + str(len(s) - 1)) 1.79769E+308

audunw 7y ago

Most of the generated images would just be noise though. You could probably be more clever than just generating random images, and have a decent chance of generating something that someone would design. These days you could use neural networks, but obviously that wasn’t feasible then

ninju 7y ago

A small tangent over to describing how many different permutations you can have with deck of cards Taken from https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.

mooman219 7y ago

An 8 by 8 bitmap has 64 pixels. there are 2^64 possible configurations of bitmaps, or 18,446,744,100,000,000,000. Your average printer can print at 600 dots per inch^2. A4 paper is 11.69in by 8.27in, with an area of 96.6763in^2. You can fit 58005.78 dots on an A4 paper assuming you can print on the edges, double that for both sides at 116011.56 dots. Ignoring actually fitting the bitmaps on the paper, you can store 1812 bitmaps per sheet of paper. You can roughly fit all possible combinations of bitmaps on 10,176,500,000,000,000 sheets of paper. Typical office paper weighs 5 grams. Ignoring the weight of ink, your total mass of paper would be 50,882,500,000,000 kilograms of paper. Pluto weighs vastly more at 13,090,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. You definitely don't need a planet's mass worth of paper, but maybe a couple of planets worth of production however. We'd be more likely to see planet scale enslavement in a Douglas Adams galaxy wide copyright mockery scheme, which galactic court would likely throw out since they don't appreciate mockeries of law, leaving everyone a bit disappointed and with entirely too much visibly grey paper.

kabdib 7y ago
(chuckles) Now, for the colored bitmaps case, how much does the ink cost? :-) We're also ignoring some edge effects, where bitmaps can be "shared" by sweeping an 8x8 frame across a printed page at the level of pixels to generate the patterns. I don't know how to think about the scale of that problem right now, don't even know if it's easy to do optimally or wickedly difficult, or if Knuth has a solution somewhere in Vol 4 . . .
- mooman219 7y ago
  A black ink HP 64XL cartridge can print 600 pages assuming a 5% page coverage of ink per page. We're actually coverage roughly 50% per page, and we do that on both sides, so we can only effectively print 30 pages with our HP 64XL cartridge. The cartridge costs about $40. We can expect to spend around $407,060,000,000,000,000 on printer ink for this endeavor, but HP might consider a bulk rate at that point. The global world product is roughly $77,868,000,000,000. If we all unite under this noble cause (and assume no economies of scale), we can payoff the cost of the ink in only 5227 and a half years, assuming paper is free (which it totally is, it grows on tress!). If someone works out how much carbon this captures, we might prevent further global warming to troll domestic courts.

yellowapple 7y ago

You could've settled for every 4×4 bitmap, of which there are only 65,536 black and white ones. Then you could claim any 8×8 bitmap as a derivative work (by concatenation/aggregation/whatever) of up to four of your 4×4 bitmaps.