The Digital Library of Babel (https://libraryofbabel.info/) was posted here a while ago, which is a tangible way to search through this space. The library comes from a book by Jorge Luis Borges, which has all possible books, meaningful and not. The people in the book are searching for books with meaning, but the chance of finding one is really small. The digital library lets you do the search electronically. Kind of fun to play around with.
It also has a link to the Universal Slideshow. Which let's one browse every image (of a given size) that represents what TeMPOral was talking about.
Ever since I discovered that site I've been slightly obsessed with it. In the "This is really interesting" sort of way. It makes one think how everything is noise. We just happen to find meaning in some of it.
Re:Time’s Almost Reversible Arrow
by dsmolovich on Friday January 08, 2016 @10:07PM
(#10869911)
It's funny though as I had a very similar idea some years ago sticking much with virtual machines. I thought that if VM's disk image is just a file represented by sequence of zeroes and ones and what if someone would generate a final number of those images starting from 0...0 to 1...1 and then probe them all on a given emulated hardware what would be a chance to discover some viable/useful software? How would we detect it? How would we know or reverse engineer it to understand what it could be used for and how to use it, interact with it etc.?
So I ended up thinking that it would be a project similar to SETI but on a smaller scale (let's say if the image size would be limited to just 1Gb).
> There are 6.02 x 10²³ atoms in 12 grams of carbon. I.e. in a tip of your pencil.
Pretty big pencil.
Or to give you a somewhat similar problem - consider a 32x32px 8bit image (a standard Windows icon since version 3.0). The image consists of 1024 pixels, each capable of representing a different color from the set of 256 colors. How many possible pictures like this are there? Or, as you'd ask in thermodynamics, in how many states such a system can be? It's 256 states per pixel raised to 1024th power (just like 6-digit binary number has 2^6 possible values). It's 256^1024. You know how much is it?
This much. (Source: [0]).Now ask yourself, how many of those pictures represent a letter "A". Quite a lot probably, but nowhere near that much. In all those 256^1024 pictures, you have every possible representable letter A, as well as any other possible Unicode character. In those images are all your most cherished private photos (or at least their thumbnails), and also the photos of all things that you'd wish happened but didn't. A thumbnail of every possible photo of the universe is there as well.
There's also something else. Something much more frequent than all other image I've just mentioned taken together. It's the noise. The things we don't recognize, the things we consider uninteresting. I ask you, use your intuition - if you were to create a random Windows icon every second, how soon would you expect to get one depicting a letter "A"?
And now realize we were talking about silly icons that are probably barely visible on your screen.
There are 6.02 x 10²³ atoms in 12 grams of carbon. I.e. in a tip of your pencil. 602000000000000000000000 atoms. Those are your pixels. And if you want to compute the number of states this pile of atoms can be in, that is the number that goes in your exponent. The base is some combination of possible positions, orientations and velocities, and then probably something else I'm forgetting right now. And almost all of those states are noise. That's how the Second Rule works.
[0] - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=256%5E1024