Photoshop is a fine
bitmap editor. Like most of 'em, it's got a "
noise" feature, which
randomly (or
pseudo-randomly, if I may
geek out for a brief moment) lightens or darkens
pixels in the selected area. The effect is a lot like "
snow" on a
television. It adds
noise to the signal, so to speak.
Well, it's
random. This thing generates
random (okay,
arbitrary, whatever) patterns of
pixels. Just like the infinite
monkeys with typewriters thing, if you beat a series of
random numbers against each other for long enough, damn near anything is liable to fall out --
eventually. If you've got some serious patience.
I've got
Photoshop running right now. If I just keep on applying "
noise" to this little
bitmap here, I'll eventually see the face of
Our Lord, or maybe even the
BVM.
Think of the picture as a number, where each
pixel is a "digit" having a range of values equal to the number of colors available: In a 32 x 32 area, that's
1024 (== 32 * 32) "digits". If that each
pixel could only be black or white, then each "digit" has a range of two possible values. This gets us a number of possible unique arrangements of
pixels equal to 2 to the
1024th power, which can be (and should be, if you want to do anything useful with it) viewed as a
1024-digit number in
base two.
We're not limited to two colors, though. We've got 256 colors. Given a 32 x 32
pixel image using
256-color
grayscale (which is what we're working with here in
Photoshop), our number is
256 to the
1024th
power: The
radix (or "base") to the power of the number of "digits", as above.
256 to the
1024th
power is a lot. (in the neighborhood of 1 followed by 2466 zeroes, I believe).
1
I'm going to be here for a long time, but you know what,
Lord? I'm ready when you are.
1You could express the same number as 2 to the 8192nd power, of course: Eight bits per pixel times 1024 pixels is 8192 bits. In plain English, that's a 8192-digit number in base 2. But if that makes any sense to you, you know it already.
tregoweth: Good question. I don't have
Kai's Power Tools.