[jodrellblank]

Reminds me of when I imagined brute-forcing every possible small picture as simply 256 shades of gray for each pixel x (640 x 480 = 307200 pixels) = 78 million possible pictures.

Actually I don't have any intuition for why that's wrong, except that if we catenate the rows into one long row then the picture can be considered as a number 307200 digits long in base 256, and then I see that it could represent 256^307200 possible different values. Which is a lot: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=256%5E307200

[p1necone]

78 million is how many pixels would be in 256 different pictures with 307200 pixels each. You're only counting each pixel once for each possible value, but you actually need to count each possible value on each pixel once per possible combinations of all of the other pixels.

The number of possible pictures is indeed 256^307200, which is an unfathomably larger number than 78 million. (256 possible values for the first pixel * 256 possible values for the second pixel * 256 possi...).

[danwills]

Yeah I had a similar thought back in the 90s and made a program to iterate through all possible images at a fairly low res, I left it running while I was at school and got home after many hours to find it had hardly got past the first row of pixels! This was a huge eye-opener about how big a possibility-space digital images really exist in!

[mystified5016]

I has the same idea when I first learned about programming as a teenager. I wonder how many young programmers have had this exact same train of thought?

[deadfoxygrandpa]

i think at some point you should have realized that there are obviously more than 78 million possible greyscale 640x480 pictures. theres a lot of intuitive examples but just think of this:

https://images.lsnglobal.com/ZFSJiK61WTql9okXV1N5XyGtCEc=/fi...

if there were only 78 million possible pictures, how could that portrait be so recongizably one specific person? wouldnt that mean that your entire picture space wouldnt even be able to fit a single portrait of everyone in Germany?

[jodrellblank]

"At some point" I do realise it. What I don't have is an intuitive feel for why a number can be three digits 000 to 999 and each place has ten choices, but it's not 10 x 3 possibles. I tried to ask ChatGPT to give me an intuition for it, but all it does is go into an explanation of combinations. I know it's 10 x 10 x 10 meaning 10^3 I don't need that explanation again, what I'm looking for is an intuition for why it isn't 10x3.

> "if there were only 78 million possible pictures, how could that portrait be so recongizably one specific person? wouldnt that mean that your entire picture space wouldnt even be able to fit a single portrait of everyone in Germany?"

It's not intuitive that "a 640x480 computer picture must be able to fit a single portrait of everyone in Germany"; A human couldn't check it, a human couldn't remember 78 million distinct pictures, look through them, and see that they all look sufficiently distinct and at no point is it representing 50k people with one picture; human attention and memory isn't enough for that.

[ThomasBHickey]

Try starting with a 2x2, then 3x3, etc. image and manually list all the possibilities.

[jodrellblank]

That's focusing on the wrong thing; as I said, "I know it's 10 x 10 x 10 meaning 10^3 I don't need that explanation [for the correct combinations], what I'm looking for is an intuition for why it isn't 10x3".

[cwmoore]

ChatGPT might be able to explain combinatorics if you use the keyterm.

I’m fond of derangements and their relationship with permutations, which contain a factor of e.

[plastic3169]

I had friend who had the same idea to do it for pixel fonts with only two colors and 16x16 canvas. It was still 2^256. Watching that thing run and trying to estimate when it would finish made me understand encryption.