from Hacker News

How much information can a small image contain?

by iciac on 10/1/21, 9:16 AM with 26 comments

  • by Svenstaro on 10/4/21, 2:24 AM

    Many moons ago, I wondered what it would look like if you iteratively generated every possible image. It doesn't sound very useful at all (and it certainly isn't) but I learned C++ and SDL that way.

    This is probably terrible code by anybody's standards but maybe someone wants to take a look: https://github.com/svenstaro/infinerator

  • by sysihyk on 10/4/21, 11:16 AM

    Very very misleading.

    First, article tried to assess information capacity in Shannon style, completely disregarding what signal is (a) two-dimensional and (b) highly redundant, that is, ignoring the traits of being an image.

    Second, article taken too much liberties while mixing photorealistic and pixel-art images. The latter is really an art, since there is no formally defined ("machine") transform between these two types. And last but not least these types have significantly different information density profiles.

    No DSP curiosity here.

  • by necovek on 10/2/21, 5:31 PM

    The introduction has lost me completely: such a long winded way to say that 32x32x3 bytes can represent 2^(32x32x3x8) different values.
  • by keithnz on 10/4/21, 5:39 AM

    I sort of came at the combinations of small images from a slightly different angle when I was a teenager, I was imagining that if there was a movie of your life (and everyone elses, in fact every possible life you could live) then you could produce every still image of that video if you restricted the bounds of the image to something small but understandable. I was very quickly was disappointed at how big the numbers get :)
  • by thro1 on 10/4/21, 11:53 AM

    Up to infinity ? (depends of person interpreting it - "a picture is worth a thousand words")
  • by sloshnmosh on 10/4/21, 4:36 AM

    I was hoping this was an article about packing different executables into images like I saw on Twitter.
  • by brijeshpatel007 on 10/4/21, 8:49 AM

    wonderful, it looks like people are talking with Zoom, kidding. a image can contain lot more information if it is designed by an professional artist. an image have an message for everyone.
  • by dukeofdoom on 10/4/21, 3:02 AM

    Would this be a good way to avoid censorship. Encode an image by mixing it with a private key image, maybe xor the cells or something like that. Post online. Anyone with the key image can decode.
  • by nixpulvis on 10/4/21, 12:20 AM

    N^M, clearly.
  • by nobrains on 10/4/21, 5:58 AM

    > "Machine learning tries to do by math what we are able to do by instinct"

    ...except that we also do it by math. It is just so fast and optimized, that we refer to it as instinct.