Comment by deadfoxygrandpa
19 days ago
i think at some point you should have realized that there are obviously more than 78 million possible greyscale 640x480 pictures. theres a lot of intuitive examples but just think of this:
https://images.lsnglobal.com/ZFSJiK61WTql9okXV1N5XyGtCEc=/fi...
:strip_exif():strip_icc()/200811/16/section_thumb/Tino_Schneider_greyscale_72_cropped3.jpg){kind=link}
if there were only 78 million possible pictures, how could that portrait be so recongizably one specific person? wouldnt that mean that your entire picture space wouldnt even be able to fit a single portrait of everyone in Germany?
"At some point" I do realise it. What I don't have is an intuitive feel for why a number can be three digits 000 to 999 and each place has ten choices, but it's not 10 x 3 possibles. I tried to ask ChatGPT to give me an intuition for it, but all it does is go into an explanation of combinations. I know it's 10 x 10 x 10 meaning 10^3 I don't need that explanation again, what I'm looking for is an intuition for why it isn't 10x3.
> "if there were only 78 million possible pictures, how could that portrait be so recongizably one specific person? wouldnt that mean that your entire picture space wouldnt even be able to fit a single portrait of everyone in Germany?"
It's not intuitive that "a 640x480 computer picture must be able to fit a single portrait of everyone in Germany"; A human couldn't check it, a human couldn't remember 78 million distinct pictures, look through them, and see that they all look sufficiently distinct and at no point is it representing 50k people with one picture; human attention and memory isn't enough for that.
Try starting with a 2x2, then 3x3, etc. image and manually list all the possibilities.
That's focusing on the wrong thing; as I said, "I know it's 10 x 10 x 10 meaning 10^3 I don't need that explanation [for the correct combinations], what I'm looking for is an intuition for why it isn't 10x3".
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