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Gigapixel Tapestries & Gigadecimal Pi
RobotWisdom writes "The new New Yorker magazine has posted two long non-technical articles about the Chudnovsky brothers and their homebrew supercomputers. One is a 1992 article about how they calculated pi to over two billion decimal places using a $70,000 cluster with 16 nodes. The other is a brandnew piece about how they spent months creating a seamless multi-gigabyte image of a fifteenth century tapestry for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tapestries are essentially pixel-art on a non-rigid (cloth) matrix, so the manual labor of photographing it inch by inch had introduced many tiny deformations in the images, which they had to mathematically iron out. Old lo-res pix of the tapestries are on the Met's site, pix of the brothers are in the world brain."
Link?
:)
"This is Zombo Com, and welcome to you who have come to Zombo Com" - www.zombo.com
Is this another April Fools article?
David told me that they were working with I.B.M. to design what may be the world's most powerful supercomputer. The machine, code-named C64, is being built for a United States government agency.
I mean, I loved my C64 too, but it's no supercomputer.
...was breaking the tapestry's copy protection. Starting in the 14th century, nobility decreed all tapestries contain a pattern of knotting designed to prevent any scanning or printing of tapestries. By the end of the 14th century, all scanner and printer manufacturers had added this anti-tapestry copying technology into their products.
That's a lot of pie! Thanks, I'll be here all week.
One is a 1992 article about how they calculated pi to over two billion decimal places
;)
Hrmm.. They should've just rounded down?
Wasn't it actally Al "Teh Intarweb" Gore who invented the Daylight Saving?
David informed her that the brothers would need to obtain the complete set of raw data from the Leica camera. The next day, he went to the museum and collected, from Bridgers, two large blue Metropolitan Museum shopping bags stuffed with more than two hundred CDs, containing every number that the Leica had collected from the Unicorn tapestries. There were at least a hundred billion numbers in the shopping bags.
Bags...and...bags...of numbers!
And now for something completely different...a man with three buttocks.
You sure this isn't quake3?
"Here is a circle, with its diameter:"
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Don't forget the Strugatsky brothers!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I don't get it. What do the Mets have to do with tapestries? Shouldn't they be more interested in keeping Pedro Martinez and Mike Piazza healthy?
Who cares whether they calculated Pi to n-billion digits? Who cares if they photographed the tapestries to the precision of an atom??
The important question that needs to be answered is: how did they end up with wives who (a) work; (b) don't force these two nerds to work; and (c) let them buy all the toys they need? Where can I get a wife like this??
Frink: [drawing on a blackboard] Here is an ordinary square.... ... but suppose we extend the square beyond the two dimensions of our universe, along the hypothetical z-axis, there.
Wiggum: Whoa, whoa - slow down, egghead!
Frink:
Everyone: [gasps]
Frink: This forms a three-dimensional object known as a "cube," or a "Frinkahedron" in honor of its discoverer, n'hey, n'hey.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Pfft. There's another mile (and change) of Manhattan north of the cloisters.
Either that, or my apartment is actually in Yonkers and I should be paying a lot less rent.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
That seems excessively irrational.
With this kind of processing power, a project of mine which I've always wanted to bring to birth, Infinity Generators, might be a reality.
... are brought into birth!
Take, if you will, a simple 640x480 image, with 256 colours. (It could be any image size and any number of colours, but this is just a standard image format). With it's 640x480 dimensions, there are a total of 307,200 pixels. If each pixel can have one of 256 colours, thats a total of 307,200^256 = 6e+1404 possible permutations of that image.
Such a system as this could in theory calculate all these permutations in a reasonable timeframe.
WHY?! you might cry.
Here's why... if we calculated every possible permutation of that 640x480 image, we could have every picture of everything that ever existed. Most, granted, would be junk, but there would be a ton of interesting, and spooky images.
Taken a little further, we could apply these generations to textual applications.
For example, remember the classic Infinite Number of Monekys on an Infininte Number of Typewriters will eventually generate Shakespeare's plays.
We could bring this into reality. Since textual documents are usually much smaller than images, we could do it faster with an Infinity Generator.
Just imagine, not only the complete works of Shakespeare, but poems, plays, songs, books that have ever and never been written
Again, we could apply the generators to create MP3 files, Films, and anything...
From Infinity, comes Creativity...
Vote devolution! http://www.devolution.co.uk