Gigapixel Tapestries & Gigadecimal Pi 215
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."
Gigabyte, gigapixel artwork? (Score:5, Funny)
:)
April fools (Score:5, Funny)
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.
The hardest technical problem... (Score:5, Funny)
Gigapixel pie? (Score:2, Funny)
What were they thinking?? (Score:4, Funny)
Hrmm.. They should've just rounded down?
Re:GODDAMN DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!!! (Score:0, Funny)
New Unit of Measurement (Score:5, Funny)
Bags...and...bags...of numbers!
Re:The Cloisters at the Met (Score:2, Funny)
Gotta wonder about "The New Yorker" readers ... (Score:4, Funny)
"Here is a circle, with its diameter:"
Re:The hardest technical problem... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:[A-Z][a-z]*sk[iy] brothers (Score:2, Funny)
The Mets site? (Score:0, Funny)
Re:New Unit of Measurement (Score:1, Funny)
Missed the real story... (Score:4, Funny)
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??
Obligatory... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Northern tip... (Score:4, Funny)
Either that, or my apartment is actually in Yonkers and I should be paying a lot less rent.
70 billion? (Score:3, Funny)
Generating Infinity.... (Score:2, Funny)
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...