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pocky% an combination | random
biotic mona n
bianco mino t
bianco mi not
bianco mo tin
bonaci m nito
manbot ionic
manbot c ioni
batino nomic
coomb aint in
tabic mino no
cabot m inion
baioc nim not
cabin mi toon
bacon tomin i
bacon omit ni
imbat cion no
ambit c onion
imban tonic o
ambon tonic i
nimbi oc^C
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A few years ago my friend Jonathan and I were discussing an interesting problem involving combinations, and very large numbers. This was around the time when the recording industry first started to publicly whine about the internet and how it was going to ruin them. The subject of copyright law was something that came up often in conversations with just about everyone. Newsweek had Napster on the front cover, and everyone that I met that knew I was into computers and music asked me my opinion on the morality and legality of music sharing / piracy. Jonathan, who is never at a loss for a crazy idea, started to think about ways that we could either benefit, or at least turn our noses up at all the silly politics that were going on. And this is how our crazy plan began...
We would generate every song ever! How would we do this? By simply coming up with every combination of digital audio samples that are possible. If someone wrote a new song, we'd be rich. And if someone sued us for generating a song that they had already recorded.... hmmm.... I don't know. After all, we're geeks, not lawyers.
So, at first we were thinking in terms of CDs. Each second of audio on a CD is made up of 44100 discrete voltage samples. Each sample can be one of 65536 different values. Oh, and there are two channels, each of which can be completely different. At first we thought we should generate every recording of a two minute song. That means for a stereo two minute song on CD, there are: 2^169344000 possible two minute songs that can be put on a CD. We can't even begin to comprehend how large a number this is. There aren't even nearly that many atoms in the universe.
Dismayed that there will never be enough hard drives to store all of our recordings, I started to change the criteria. What if we just generated every one second of audio? What it it were mono? How about reducing the quality of the audio so as to make for less data? If you generated all the one second samples, you would have all the two minute songs, or songs of every length, just in a mixed up order. If we wanted to generate all of the mono one second recordings with 11000 discrete voltage samples which can each be one of 256 possible values. This makes only 2^88000 combinations. There aren't that many atoms in the universe either! Holy cow! I started to get that sinking feeling that this was yet another invention that hadn't already been realized for one simple reason: it was impossible.
And just now the idea has come back to me, because it's one of those things that makes you feel like you can't really grasp it. Numbers so large that our brains are far too small to appreciate the largeness. I keep thinking that I might all of a sudden have a breakthough and figure out a way to make use of this idea. Maybe I'll fall off the toilet and hit my head and it will all be clear, like in Back to the Future. But unfortunately I think that it's too weird.
Just think for a moment what it would mean to have all the possible sounds that could be recorded. Forget about the differences and limitations of recording technology. The sound on CDs is pretty good, and stereo is also pretty good at reproducing realism, especially when you listen with headphones. So, consider that when we say every sound possible we're actually talking about a reasonable approximation of every sound as you would hear it in stereo on a CD, which is similar to how your ears would hear the same sounds if you were actually there.
You could listen to every sound ever created, being created or to be created in the future. Every word that everyone has ever said or ever will say. Even sounds that will never exist. You could listen to a live concert from every seat in the house, from outside in the back alley, or from across the city over the telephone while your friend is knocking on your door. You could listen to a favorite piece of music with your voice singing, or no drums, or up one semitone. You could listen to every lecture you ever attended or will be attending in school. You could hear every sound on every black box voice recorder, even if it was lost or destroyed. Every possible saxophone solo, every possible sound made by every possible musical instrument, real or imaginary. The instructions read aloud for every recipe. Every pep-talk given to a football team, with every possible combination of cheering in the background. Every possible word, language, dialect and accent spoken by every possible voice. All possible laughs, sneezes, coughs and throat clearings. Every love poem or sentimental vow. Every cat meow, dog bark, duck quack and cow moo. Oh, and did I mention, we also get every possible random noise? The more I think about it, the more examples I come up with, because any example works. This would be the most incredible sound synthesizer ever created!
If your brain hasn't exploded from contemplation, you can probably see the incredible potential of being able to hear any possible sound. Of course we would only be able to hear a tiny miniscule fraction of the sounds that can be generated, but those sounds could be anything. They might not be meaningful to us at all, or they might be our mother asking us how we doing, or our favorite song, although the chances of that are very small.
And if this isn't all mind-boggling enough, think about what would happen if we applied this to images. Every photograph, frame of video or film, your house painted any colour, with grass growing on the roof, with a space ship parked in the driveway. With a bay window where the front door was. A picture of you at every moment of your life, sitting at a bar with everyone you know, don't know, will know and won't know.
Ok, I think it's time for me to stop. My brain hurts.