Pixels of Babel

"Infinity is hard to comprehend"

- Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden)

Bruce is right there! Infinity is something that is impossible for the human mind to wrap itself around. Even enormous, finite numbers cannot seem to hold any meaning in the mind. After reading The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges and A Short Stay In Hell by Steven L. Peck, I decided to finally create my own version of the Library of Babel that has been rattling around in my head for a while now...

That is where the "Pixels of Babel" comes in! I love messing around with PICO-8 and retro video games, but I am not much of a pixel artist. I started thinking that an 8x8 pixel sprite is pretty tiny. How many possible sprites could there be? Couldn't I just generate them all programatically and then filter through and keep the good ones? Turns out, no... no you cannot! Not even if you keep it down to just 2 colours!

The possible combinations of 8x8 pixel sprites with just 2 colours is 2^64 (I think that is how you write 2 to the power of 64). Which evaluates to 18446744073709551616 different sprites. If you generated 1 sprite per second it would take 584.9 billion years to view all of the sprites. That is about 42 times the estimated age of the universe!

BUT! 2 colours is boring... So I upped it to 4 colours, which is a loooooooooooot more sprites (340282366920938463463374607431768211456 to be exact). But in the end this would give us every possible Gameboy sprite! (Hence the GB colour pallete). So start generating because it is going to take a while!

How long would it take to find the pacman sprite? Space invaders sprites? An 8x8 Mona Lisa?

Select a number between 0 and 340282366920938463463374607431768211455 to see a new sprite.

If you enjoy this sort of thing then check out the books mentioned at the top, as well as other experiments like this website, libraryofbabel.info, this piece of music John Cage's "Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible)" , and this band that create incredibly long albums reaching into quintillions of years Bull of Heaven.