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.

> the filling of the pixels with carefully chosen colors

See, to me this means "reading the colors from the printout". It's ridiculous that anyone could get the least significant bits of the color right by just eyeballing it, and I don't think the author ever claimed he was doing that.

> It's ridiculous that anyone could get the least significant bits of the color right by just eyeballing it

If you look at the video carefully, you'll see that the color picker displays numeric RGB values and that it has been sped up. Do you think the code would work if he didn't get the values 100% right?

Of course that values have to be right. The colours are picked to build the algorithm.

Off to the right side of the screen (not visible) is probably another image with the colours in that he's picking from.

Maybe it's fake but it's theoretically possible. I don't have a windows pc to try on. He's provided the image though so you could try for yourself.

I'm pretty sure that is not what this is about (showing that one can 'paint' coded animations) but to showcase how powerful algorithms are.

Am I wrong?