A grid of 16 by 16 black-and-white pixels is about the smallest canvas on which pictures still feel like pictures. It has 256 cells, each either on or off, so it can show exactly 2256 different images — roughly 1.16 × 1077 of them, about the number of atoms in the observable universe.
Finite, but only technically. Every letter of every alphabet, every tiny face, every icon ever drawn at this size, and every icon that never will be — each one already sits at a numbered position in the sequence, between oceans of static. If you counted through them at a billion images per second, you would finish in about 3.7 × 1060 years. The universe is 1.4 × 1010 years old.
This page is a small machine for failing to comprehend that.
Each pixel you set free doubles the number of possible pictures. Watch what 256 doublings does.
Possible pictures so far
1
No pixels yet. Exactly one possible picture: blank.
0 of 256 pixels free · row 1 of 16
Watch the integers become pictures. The first pixels flicker; the bottom rows will not change before the stars burn out.
one per second — a patient human
- Counted this session
- 0
- Time left at this speed
One slider, 1077 positions. Drag it, then zoom into the region under the handle, and again — it takes 26 zooms to single out one image. The distance is the exhibit.
zoom 0 of 26
The stripes you'll see while dragging are not a glitch. Every position the handle can reach is a simple fraction of the way along, and fractions have repeating binary digits — the slider only visits round numbers. True noise is unreachable by hand. (See the Fractions tab.)
The grid shows the first 256 binary digits of your fraction, sixteen to a row. Fractions repeat — 1⁄3 = 0.0101… forever in binary — so they stripe. Whether the stripes stand up straight or lean depends on how the repeat fits into rows of 16.
Click and drag to paint. Everything you can draw here already has a number — make something, and see when it would arrive if you counted from zero.
Almost every image in the space looks like this. Pictures that look like anything are so rare the fraction rounds to zero — order is the exception, noise is the rule.
You are looking at image №
0
- Digits in that number
- 1
- Arrival time, counting from zero at one billion per second
- no time at all
where this image sits on the full timeline, № 0 → № 2256−1
The rooms we will not build
This grid is the small one, chosen because its impossibility is still almost graspable. We thought about building the bigger ones. We are not going to, and the reason why is the exhibit.
Give this same 16×16 grid full 24-bit color and the count jumps from 1077 to about 101,850 — the atoms-in-the-universe comparison died in the first sentence. One single 720p frame — 1280 × 720, ordinary video — is about 106,658,301: writing the address of one particular frame, digit after digit, would fill a 1,200-page book. One 4K frame is about 1059,924,718. And a two-hour 4K film, taken as a single object, has roughly 1010,000,000,000,000 possible versions — the exponent is itself a 14-digit number. Somewhere in that count is every film ever made, every film never made, and a perfect recording of your entire life from every angle, with subtitles, in languages that don't exist yet.
A bigger canvas would not make the idea bigger. Past this grid the numbers stop being quantities and become typography — the only thing left to compare them to is each other. The frontier you can actually feel is the one in the toy above, and it is already past the edge of the universe.
Library
Reading and viewing on near-infinities inside finite spaces. Suggestions welcome.
- “We Tested Anthropic’s Fable 5 for a Week” — Every The video that prompted this site: Borges’ Library of Babel turned into an explorable game by a language model.
- “The Library of Babel” — Jorge Luis Borges, 1941 The ur-text: a universe-sized library containing every possible 410-page book, and the despair of its librarians.
- libraryofbabel.info — Jonathan Basile Borges’ library, actually built: every possible page of text, searchable. Find the page that describes your death; find the one that gets it wrong.
- Babel Image Archives — Jonathan Basile The same idea for pictures: every possible 416×640 color image, which is to say, this toy taken seriously.
- Infinite monkey theorem — Wikipedia The classical version: randomness plus enough time produces Shakespeare, and why “enough time” is doing unbelievable work in that sentence.