You've missed the point of the article. Of course the author is picking from a predefined palette and placing colors in a memorised pattern. This is a theatrica

You've missed the point of the article. Of course the author is picking from a predefined palette and placing colors in a memorised pattern. This is a theatrical way to demonstrate the main point of the article, which is that: it takes less space to write a 3 minutes HD animated video and music clip than than it takes to store a 32×32 pixel icon The video very clearly demonstrated that using only a 9x9x24bit image you can encode a program that, when executed, will produce many MBs of data. It's the same concept as x (k)Bytes of data producing an infinitely scrolling procedurally generated terrain.