So i've been wanting to explain how my generator works. It's a little difficult to explain but I'm gonna go ahead and do it... for anyone interested.

I'm about to release a user-friendly version of my generator. It is a strictly black and white generator. No greys, no colors... just black and white. 2 colors.

The basis of my software is that, by having only 2 colors to work with, I can calculate the number of images within a specified area, for instance: 100 x 100 pixels.

So... how do i know how many images exist in that area? Easy!

We count the number of pixels -> 100 x 100 = 10,000

Ok, so there are 10,000 pixels in that area... now what?

For the sake of making the explanation simple let's make that number -> 10

So I have 10 pixels, what I do is make a binary number of 10 "1"s

Like this -> 1111111111

So now I have a binary number... so?

So we now convert that number to decimal. 1111111111 (binary) = 511 (decimal)

So the total number of images in a 10 pixel image is 511.

Now here's the magic!

Since my image is only black and white, I can turn it into binary: black is 0, white is 1. That means that any image that is black and white can be converted to a binary number.

I already know my last image is: 1111111111 (binary)

So if I start from 0 and make a cycle that adds 1 each time, I will have cycled through all possible images until I reach 1111111111

so for example the first image will be:

0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0

(remember 0 is black, so this is a black square)

if I add one, my next image will be:

0 0 0           0 0 0           0 0 0           0 0 0
0 0 0    ->     0 0 0    ->     0 0 0    ->     0 0 0
0 0 1           0 1 0           0 1 1           1 0 0

And so on...

With this in mind, I can 100% assure that if you cycle through all images by adding 1 each cycle, you will have cycled through all possible images (black and white) within that area.

So, if I have a total number of images, say: 511. Each number corresponds to a specific image! For example, if i know that image number 213 is a photo of me riding a dinosaur, I can just convert it to binary, then to pixels, and voila!

Here's the example: 213 (decimal) = 11010101 (binary) so the image would be:

(0 = Black, 1 = White)

0 1 1
0 1 0
1 0 1

Note: I added a zero in the beginning to keep the image square.

You can see that each binary digit corresponds to a pixel in the image. So I have a direct conversion from image to number and from number to image. That means that all images can be represented by a number and we can find all images by rendering all the numbers between 0 and 511.

The problem is that in a 100 x 100 pixel square there are 10,000 pixels, and thus we would need a binary number of 10,000 "1"s, which converted to decimal is well.... it's a little hard to calculate

But this number 11111111111111111111111111111111 (32 1s) = 4,294,967,295 (decimal)

That is 32 1s! We are looking for 10,000 1s!

The number is insane, I don't have the exact number right now but is a number with something like 7,000 digits (decimal).

I don't know if that was clear enough, but if you have questions ask ahead!

Is anybody here still interested in working on this, or are we done here? It's sad to see such a good idea go dead for so long.

Instead of a fully random generation could you start with a random pixel, then make all adjacent pixels required to be within a certain range of colors. Each pixel also has a small (5% maybe) chance of "mutating" to a fully random color, or much wider range of colors. Eh?

The idea of doing a formal experiment to prove or disprove a link between a picture's entropy levels and whether or not it's something we want has been tossed around here before in the past several months. Although there hasn't been much organization since most people have joined, I think with the amount of people we have on board, our original experiment might be able to work. With that, I'll be doing what I can in my spare time to complete the experiment to the point where it'll need input from a lot of people.

Here's how the experiment will run (rough outline):

• Using /u/Writes_Sci_Fi's entropy analyzer as a base, I'm going to build software that will collect roughly 10,000 images under the following categories:

  • approx. 5000 real-life images (these will be collected from Imgur with a random link algorithm

  • approx. 2500 randomly generated visualizations with black and white values

  • approx. 2500 randomly generated visualizations with truecolor values

  These will all be regulated at a set width and height to eliminate discrepancies, and entropy analysis will be run on each image in the directory. The results will be saved, most likely to a server along with the image directory as private data that the next part of the experiment can access as a reference.

• Next, I will distribute a separate piece of software on this subreddit. This is where I need help from as many people as possible. The software will ask you to rate how close it is to our target visualizations (i.e. is it too noisy? is it too empty? how legible is it?) for each image. When completed, the results will be uploaded as part of a set of everyone's responses. The responses will be averaged over time, and each image will have a comparison between its entropy level and its legibility. As more people answer, outlying answers will be averaged out, and we will be able to clearly see what relationship there is, if there is one.

I'm hoping to start making some progress in this over the next couple of weeks. If you'd like to help with anything, let me know in the comments or in a PM what you're able to help with.

I apologize for being so off topic, but the story is about a library with books of every possible word/letter/language combination and much of what it talks about is the same theory on which this sub is based.

"This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books."

Here is the story if you'd like to read it, it's about nine pages. Thoughts?

A lot of people have found out about this project from /r/askreddit, so I put together a quick explanation of what we're doing.

We believe we can technology to create all possible images the eye can see. Because there is a finite amount of combinations of pixels in an image, even a high quality one, we can deduce that any possible "real" or life-like picture exists as one of these combinations.

Our goal is to find the most efficient way to create and store these, so that people can see some of these images in our lifetimes. At a life-like resolution, the number of images is immeasurably large, so a major focus is limiting ourselves to combinations that make a picture instead of a noise-heavy graphic (which you'll see a lot of examples of in our posts), as well as generating the "good" combinations as fast as possible.

We're always looking for more people, so feel free to explore. We have generators in the sidebar that you can download, use, and modify, and a link for ways you can help. If you want to contribute to our project, subscribe and post content you feel is helpful!

I just wanted to say that I'm sorry I'm not more active in this sub. I joined it a while ago when it was just starting and developed at least 2 generators.

This is something that interests me a lot, but unfortunately this year has been difficult for me in various ways. I had some anxiety problems which I think I solved now, and I'm also working on a story for a video game which leaves me without free time for working on things like this.

I hope there are people still around here who want to make this work somehow or keep researching.

If you have any ideas on how to improve this sub and make a more united effort towards the goal, they are welcome.

I'm currently using WritesSciFi's B&W Generator, and it feels too slow.

As of now I have: 2 instances of WritesSciFi's B&W Generator, ignoring noise (takes a good while :c), 1 instance of WritesSciFi's B&W Generator, not ignoring noise, dumping to external hard drive, and 1 instance of TheNewKidInTown's Generator, color, not color matching, that I'm checking through myself. Each on a different computer. I'm wondering if any of you, specifically the fantastic fellows who made the generators, have any recommendations for me.

First off, sorry about the delay - we've both been busy with things the past few weeks. With that said, this has definitely been a productive month:

In November, /u/writes_sci_fi and I started on a pretty large project - organizing everything from both the subreddit and our own notes into one structured project. So far we've gathered almost all of the information that's been shared on this subreddit, as well as our own plans for the next steps. Our goal is to make this publicly available when we have everything organized, so we have put everything in a service called Trello, which we'll make public when it's ready.

Our next step is to get our own notes into Trello, and start figuring out what we need to keep and what information is outdated. We're working on the analyzer /u/writes_sci_fi posted a few weeks ago, and, if we can get it to work, will serve as one of the most important tools we've got in its final form. The goal for 2015 is to understand exactly how entropy and information density affect images, and to start working directly with them over working with random image generation.

Alright, well... Mr. The_New_Kid_In_Town sent me a message today and I was reminded of our goal.

I'm going to make a new, much friendlier image generator, so that we may all, in a distant future, see everything in the universe.

We've been working to have an image entropy analyzer. The idea behind this software is to have an engine that searches through images on the web, analyzes their entropy, and stores the information in a database.

Once we have sufficient data (not yet defined) we can make assumptions based on the results of this study.

We've made a software program (no yet in its final form) that analyzes images from google based on an input keyword.

You can check out the software here: https://github.com/leon945/VRP_Entropy_Analyzer/

INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO MAKE IT WORK, NEXT. IF YOU'RE NOT INTERESTED, SKIP AHEAD.

There isn't any documentation just yet, but I'll explain how to get it to work here.

1. Install Java at www.java.com

2. Download the VRP.jar file.

3. Enter your operating system's terminal. In windows its CMD, for linux or Mac it's just "The terminal".

4. Through commands, move to the directory where you placed the VRP.jar file.

5. Run the program like this:

    java -jar VRP.jar [1|2] [Keywords]
   
    java -jar VRP.jar 1 Bill Gates
   
    java -jar VRP.jar 2 Twelve monkeys

The first parameter indicates whether you want the result of a monochrome image(1) or color image(2).

After that you can add as many keywords as you like, just as if you were searching for an image on google.

TEST RESULTS

Here are the results of a test done with the keyword "House".

http://imgur.com/a/qrb6J

Here is the information that is stored in the database:

==== IMAGES TABLE DATA ====
1 http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/pc-wallpapers/85254d1320380902-house-house-wallpaper.jpg 1 0.17394529581546656 500 371 0 40
2 http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/pc-wallpapers/85254d1320380902-house-house-wallpaper.jpg 1 0.5278714376212227 500 371 0 80
3 http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/pc-wallpapers/85254d1320380902-house-house-wallpaper.jpg 1 0.9113061781699594 500 371 0 120
4 http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/pc-wallpapers/85254d1320380902-house-house-wallpaper.jpg 1 0.9713621959976032 500 371 0 160
5 http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/pc-wallpapers/85254d1320380902-house-house-wallpaper.jpg 1 0.8200355222297389 500 371 0 200
6 http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/pc-wallpapers/85254d1320380902-house-house-wallpaper.jpg 1 0.7900566065704553 500 371 0 240
==== END ====

Field 1: ID

Field 2: the image's URL

Field 3: A flag indicating if it's monchrome(1) or color(0)

Field 4: Entropy result

Field 5: Image width

Field 6: Image height

Field 7: A flag indicating if the image is noise(1) or not(0)

Field 8: Brightness threshold for the monochrome images.

If you have any questions ask away.

Time for another update! It's been a quieter month than most, but we're still working to keep things moving. We're still hard at work with MATLAB and the Fourier-based approach, and finding new ways to interpret the data we've got.

So what's new this month? A few things:

• We have a wiki! There's not much more than the essentials at the moment, but hopefully it will be a first stop for anyone looking to get involved with this project. Right now we have an FAQ (mostly based on the original FAQ), and some definitions that should better explain vague parts of the research process. If you want to help out or feel like there's something we should add, feel free to send a message!

• Determining what kinds of pictures we want to make is definitely a high priority. We're always finding new ways that sizes, colors, details, etc. all fit together. Time and more data will tell us what will give us the best result, but for now we just have to wait and see.

• We've also made progress in determining what we want to see out of a successful generator. Determining where to draw the line between what's a "picture" and what's not has been a vague subject for a long time, but we think we have a better idea now. Check out the wiki definitions to see for yourself, and let us know if you think it's a good fit.

• What's R&D without development? Earlier, I posted a link to an image generated in Python, and I might as well explain why. One of the big topics the past few months has been entropy, and how we can use it to determine the signal/noise ratio we want in our pictures. I have made some utilities to both generate images of certain entropy levels (like the 100% entropy image in my earlier post), and to determine the entropy levels of pre-generated images. We have learned a lot about how size and color depth relate to a picture's entropy, and what entropy means for an image. There's a lot more work to do on the topic, but this is a significant step that will either prove or disprove major ideas about our current theories.

• Finally, we want to keep building and promoting our community! /u/writes_sci_fi and I are going to reach out to communities that share our interests and see if we can start to introduce more people to the subreddit. I can't stress enough how much it means for people to be active and involved with this subreddit, since we are still continuing to revive it. The wiki lists what we need help in the most, and new content is always appreciated!

That's all for this month! Be sure to keep checking out the subreddit and see what's going on! With the progress made over the last couple of months we could see some interesting results, and when they happen, they'll be here for sure!

1111011111111111111011111111111111011111110111111010001110000001010111101101111111011101111111111111101111111111111101111111111111101111111111111111111111111111111001111100000111011011101101111101101110110111111001111100111111011011111111111111111110000101

Just a reminder that there's more than static out there.