FASCINATION WITH NUMBERS

On numbers and combinations



TAKE an image of 8x8 pixels. Assume it can only be black & white.
A boring b&w 8x8 icon with not much space for something really creative.

How many DIFFERENT such icons can there be?

There is total 8*8 = 64 pixels, each can be 0 (black) or 1 (white),
that gives us total
2^64 = 1.84467440737096E19 of possible 8x8 icons,
that is 1 with 19 zeros or 10000000000000000000,
or more (but not quite) precisely about 18446744073709600000.

Now let's think how much time it would take to see them all - one second each:

It would take us (86400 = 24*3600 seconds in a day)

1.84467440737096E19/86400 = 213503982334602 days

or

1.84467440737096E19/86400/365 = 584 942 417 355.074 years

not adjusting for leap years of course to make it simplier.

Let's assume there are 7 billion people living today.

If we ask them all to do nothing but stare at our 8x8 set of icons constantly,
one every 1 second it would require

584942417355.074/7e9 = 83.5632024792963 years

So if we want to see ALL POSSIBLE 8x8 b&w icons, one second of time for each
and even if 7 billion people were engaged in the process it would stll require over 83 years...


Isn't that amazing?