Every Possible Picture

Thom Whalen

I wrote a computer program which displays every picture that can be displayed on a computer screen. Every possible picture.

What does it mean to display "every possible picture?" It means literally what those words say. If left running for long enough, every picture in every art gallery in the world will be displayed on this screen, everything that any person has ever seen, or could ever have seen, or could imagine seeing will be displayed. Every frame of every movie ever made; every medical x-ray; every page of every book that could have been written; every top secret government blueprint will be displayed. Literally every possible picture will appear on this screen eventually. And this includes every possible variation of every picture. The Mona Lisa will be displayed, not just as Da Vinci painted it, but also with blond hair, with a bad complexion, sideways and upside down. It will be displayed with every part a little lighter or darker. It will be displayed in every shade of every hue.

Your picture will be displayed on this screen. Not just once, but innumerable times. Your face and body will be shown from every angle in every position at every age. This screen will display pictures of you at the moment of your greatest triumph and at the moment of your deepest shame. It will display pictures of you that show you doing things that you never did and would never do.

Imagine some picture. No matter what picture you are imagining, you will see that picture on this screen if you watch for long enough. Guaranteed.

How can this program do that? It is easy. In a computer, a picture is just a binary number. Think for a minute about the odometer in your car. If you drive your car for long enough, your odometer will display every possible seven digit number, starting with seven zeros and ending with seven nines. That is exactly what this program does with pictures. There are one million points of color on this screen and each point can be painted with one of 16,777,216 colors. By changing each point on the screen to each color in sequence, the program counts through every possible picture, beginning with a completely black screen and ending with a completely white screen.

How long is it going to take to display every possible picture? To get the number of possible pictures, just multiply 16,777,216 times itself one million times. The result is an unimaginably large number, larger than would fit on any calculator; the answer is a number with more than seven million digits. Remember that a trillion has only thirteen digits and a trillion trillions 26 digits. We do not have a name for a number with seven million digits. If this computer had started displaying one thousand pictures every second when the universe was born, fourteen billion years ago, it would have shown only a minuscule fraction of the possible pictures so far.

Thus, this computer will display your great grandmother's portrait if you could keep watching for long enough, but you would have a long, long wait.

Observations:

Many people have extraordinary difficulty accepting that it is possible for a computer program to display every possible picture. They try to negotiate the definition of every possible picture. "You mean every picture that you have stored in the computer?" or "You mean some kind of simplified pictures?"

It is not that hard to understand how the program works, but it is hard to accept that it really does what is claimed: that it will draw every picture that can exist as clearly as a digital photograph.

The secret lies in the number of possible pictures. People cannot imagine what a number with a million digits is, so they have difficulty imagining the magic that occurs when a program can work on a problem that has a dimension that large.

The vast majority of possible pictures are uninteresting. Even though they are each unique, they all look the same to us: just coloured snow. This raises the issue of what an artist does for us. One interpretation is that the important job of an artist is not to make pictures, even a simple computer program can do that, but to choose from all the possible pictures, the fraction of a percent that might mean something to us.

If there is a God who has a face, then this program will draw the face of God. But only a divine computer could keep working for long enough to show it. And only an angel with eternity to waste could keep watching long enough to see it.