Download the podcast of my BBC Radio4 show, Domestic Science (Ep1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02pc9x6/episodes/downloads
In this video I start with how many 256×256 greyscale images are possible and work my way up to the maximum number of possible YouTube videos.
Original question on twitter:
https://twitter.com/dedwarmo/status/755799688759037953
Here is our radio show on the BBC radio player. Let me know if it does not work for you.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07lxqq8/episodes/player
Our Festival of the Spoken Nerd DVD and download:
https://shop.festivalofthespokennerd.com/
Galaxy M81 image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright
MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician
Website: http://standupmaths.com/
Maths book: http://makeanddo4D.com/
Nerdy maths toys: http://mathsgear.co.uk/
source
40 comments
I know I’m a timelord and I should expect this but dammit I’m in the wrong now!
this was released on july 28th 2016 not july 27th, correct for his video
The 128GB limit of YouTube videos assumes that nothing changes about their system in this unfathomably long time. But then the ID system would also not change, which restricts the total to just 73786976294838206464 videos. I think that might be slightly less.
I am curious what this number would be if you used the resolution of the eye as a baseline.
If you create a scale from zero to Grahams number, is this larger number relating to the YouTube videos closer to zero or to Grahams number?
A bit late but I still gotta mention that computer have to generate 2^(bitdepth*x*y) images. Further depends on performance and free storage space but it seems like that storage should be practically infinite and computer must have kind of 65K qubit processor. I’m not even sure that 2^15 Hz rate is practically possible to reach in electronic chips since the speed of light is finite, charges are quantized and all minimal distances, voltages etc are as well reciprocally finite, so quantum effects probably should be considered as the primary problem in implementing this hypothetic femtohertz generation of computers.
Adjacent edges of 1 FHz clock will be just 300 nm away from each other which also means that clock generator will actually be a UV laser.
6:35 if anyone wonders, I've checked all numbers up to 2^1,000,000 and 65,536 is the only power of two that has no ones, twos, fours and eights
i calculated that only with 8k,60fps and 12hours videos there are 8.5536e+13 possible videos without even including sound!
I am watching this video six years later, so it appears I am not in the correct "now"
12:53 fun fact: The name of the base 10 version of this number (approximately 10^2,408,239,875) is "One duooctingentillisesquadrintaseptingentilliquinquavigintioctingentillion".
you should redo these calculations with quantum computers. i think it would be interesting
I would be interesting to have a website that could genorate every possible 256×256 grayscale image as like a big catalog
Like it wouldnt have to store them, the could be like the everything formula, that plots every possible 17×21 black and white image
Then you could have it take an image and give you the "id" of which 256×256 grayscale image you have
And to keep the id from being unfathomably large youd have to store it in some ludicrously high base, luckily there are 149186 total unicode characters so im sure wed be fine
And then people could like buy or submit captions for any given id / page of the catalog
Im sure there could be alot of "interesting" intellectual property problems that can arise from it
As technically a picture of every single face that can ever exist including yours, at every age, in every state, from every possible angle is in the catalog
Every character that has been thought up, that will be thought up, and that will never be thought up is in the catalog
Any landscape, building, logo, artwork, that could possibly exist would be in that catalog
A very threatening bit of text calling you by name and showing your home address and family members names is in the catalog
A very very incriminating photo of current, past, and future government officials is in the catalog
That was one of the clearest explanations of a massively large number I've ever seen.
6:46 I have one, 2 to the power of -1. That's 0.5.
Done.
16 is a power of 2 that does not have a power of 2 digit in it…
Tracking unimaginably long timescales using "an atom of our universe in a pile one universe over" resonates with me as a Buddhist. Shakyamuni used it a lot only with dust particles cause he didn't know about atoms yet.
Man get sub % 6 years ago.
6:30 I've check the first 10^5 powers of two with my super (in)efficient python code, and it only spits out 65.536…
I'm 6 years apart from the correct now
In few years the max limit of youtube may change . Then what ?
Was hoping you would have applied moors law
The only way to speed this thought experiment up would be a computer using parallelism.
Obviously the eaiest solution is to use more than one supercomputers
Did you include sound? Some of the videos won’t make much sense without sound.
If I'm not mistaken, you considered only the number of YouTube videos of maximum length. You skipped the videos that were just 1 frame less. Or 2 frames less down to the minimum length for a YouTube video (would that actually be 1 frame!?). Anyway, all shorter videos than that would qualify for being pairwise different. And I guess while we're at it we should probably distinguish between resolutions as well – they are again different videos…
Maybe we can break the barrier of universe to the universe amount of possibilities 😂
Only… How many of those videos would get banned from YouTube because of the content? You can't include those. Any ideas on how to approximate that!? 😅
Hello from the version of now 5 years in the future
6:45 Incidentally, my favorite two-power is 2^25 = 33554432, where three consecutive pairs are found, and all digits of this number are below 6.
Approximately one-third? How can you be approximately one third of the people? Wouldn't that require an incomplete person? You can't have part of a person, either you're one-third, one-half, or one-fourth!
for actual youtube videos the max filesize is 128GB or 1024000000000 bits. If we assume that all 128GB files are valid video files that would give us 2^1024000000000 possible videos
But a lot of the pictures are the same just roteted 90 dagrees
since watching these videos the word primetime now means something else to me
65526 Max rows in old excel…. Hope that never becomes a problem when tracking large samples of some kind of test results….
Matts new film: 256 shades of grey staring pythagorean theorem, factorials and euler's identity
Watching 1000 years later. Still true.
What about 8k videos??
nobody seems to mind that you are using a picture of a galaxy for your universe
Going by a different interpretation of "how many YouTube videos are possible?"
The unique video addresses in URLs have 11 characters. Each character can have 64 possible values (0-9, A-Z, a-z, – or _) and so there are 64^11 possible YouTube video addresses, which is 2^66 or about 7.37×10^19 (73 quintillion). Still an incomprehensibly large number, but that hypothetical supercomputer would only take about 20.5 hours to get through that. Nowhere near base universe.
These analogies are fun. But the short answer is ASTRONOMICAL.
The final statistic is inaccurate because it also includes every video that violates youtube ToS and they dont count towards every possible youtube video
6:35 I actually checked checked to 2^50,000 (using code) and there was no other number that didn't have 1, 2, 4, or 8. Wow.
Comments are closed.