3 ms·

Hmm, one key for even every possible Unicode code point (including surrogates, noncharacters and reserved ones, all the way from U+0000 to U+10FFFF) makes 1,114

Hmm, one key for even every possible Unicode code point (including surrogates, noncharacters and reserved ones, all the way from U+0000 to U+10FFFF) makes 1,114,112 keys. That’d be a big keyboard with rather poor random access characteristics. Allow 20×20mm for each key (seems a fairly typical sort of size) and that’s almost 446m². I dunno what you’ll use your 16,777,216 keys for (I agree, it ought to be enough for anyone), but as a full-sized keyboard it’s going to have a surface area of at least two thirds of a hectare. You could build a giant hamster ball a bit over 46m in diameter and lay the keys out on the inside, travelling the world as you spin the ball in order to find the right key. (The Unicode 13 hamster wheel keyboard might be more reasonable, its 143,859 keys requiring a diameter of less than five metres. Perhaps more manageable, but some keys might be harder to access as you roll through cities since the ball is no longer big enough to almost ignore many houses.)

quickthrower2 5y ago
I wonder how many octaves and what frequency you’d get to on a piano with this many keys? This is 1,398,101.333333333 octaves so I guess even starting at 1hz the top frequency is 2^1398101 hz. Gamma rays are about 10^22 so the frequency is probably so high as to blow up the universe or something.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  I’d suggest smaller intervals, like a cent instead of a semitone, but the numbers are so absurdly large that dividing it by a hundred doesn’t really help anything. You’d need a good deal more than 64-bit floating point numbers for any pertinent calculations, 10³⁰⁸ is pretty tiny; and the theoretical string tensions involved would be quite something. Perhaps an organ is the right answer instead, with one key per pipe rather than the usual multiplexing. The Wanamaker Organ makes a good start with 28,750 pipes across 484 ranks (though it multiplexes them across a paltry six manuals plus pedalboard), but you’re going to need to come up with a lot more sounds, and the speed of sound is low enough that it’s not going to work very well done acoustically. (Hmm… y’know, there’s actual scope for an art piece here, an organ but producing light instead of sound, like lidar is to sonar. I think you’d struggle to produce anything the human eye would appreciate, but it’s a fun concept.) Or perhaps it should be splitting each manual into one for each combination of sounds it controls. That might well go over the 2²⁴, I’m not thinking about the numbers too exactly.
- scns 5y ago
  A yes the Gamma Ray, one of my favourite phenomena. Giving off as much energy as our dear sun radiates in her lifetime. Well, maybe we use 10e-absurdlyLargeNumber as our base note then, just to stay safe. Hm, how many years will we have to wait, till the lowest notes went through one cycle?
scns 5y ago
The most elaborate joke i read on HN so far, well done! Thank you and the others who rolled with it.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Thank you. I’ll be here all week.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  It was actually a case of me going and doing something else and then returning to this tab and reading first of all the comment that I responded to; yet having forgotten the context, I immediately thought of keyboard keys; and the concept amused me so I ran with it and it ended up somewhere a bit different from where I expected!
  - scns 5y ago
    What a lucky accident.

quickthrower2 5y ago

I wonder how many octaves and what frequency you’d get to on a piano with this many keys? This is 1,398,101.333333333 octaves so I guess even starting at 1hz the top frequency is 2^1398101 hz. Gamma rays are about 10^22 so the frequency is probably so high as to blow up the universe or something.

chrismorgan 5y ago
I’d suggest smaller intervals, like a cent instead of a semitone, but the numbers are so absurdly large that dividing it by a hundred doesn’t really help anything. You’d need a good deal more than 64-bit floating point numbers for any pertinent calculations, 10³⁰⁸ is pretty tiny; and the theoretical string tensions involved would be quite something. Perhaps an organ is the right answer instead, with one key per pipe rather than the usual multiplexing. The Wanamaker Organ makes a good start with 28,750 pipes across 484 ranks (though it multiplexes them across a paltry six manuals plus pedalboard), but you’re going to need to come up with a lot more sounds, and the speed of sound is low enough that it’s not going to work very well done acoustically. (Hmm… y’know, there’s actual scope for an art piece here, an organ but producing light instead of sound, like lidar is to sonar. I think you’d struggle to produce anything the human eye would appreciate, but it’s a fun concept.) Or perhaps it should be splitting each manual into one for each combination of sounds it controls. That might well go over the 2²⁴, I’m not thinking about the numbers too exactly.
scns 5y ago
A yes the Gamma Ray, one of my favourite phenomena. Giving off as much energy as our dear sun radiates in her lifetime. Well, maybe we use 10e-absurdlyLargeNumber as our base note then, just to stay safe. Hm, how many years will we have to wait, till the lowest notes went through one cycle?

scns 5y ago

The most elaborate joke i read on HN so far, well done! Thank you and the others who rolled with it.

rbanffy 5y ago
Thank you. I’ll be here all week.
chrismorgan 5y ago
It was actually a case of me going and doing something else and then returning to this tab and reading first of all the comment that I responded to; yet having forgotten the context, I immediately thought of keyboard keys; and the concept amused me so I ran with it and it ended up somewhere a bit different from where I expected!
- scns 5y ago
  What a lucky accident.