Generating a picture

Let's leave it to chance

Every time you watch tv, the picture is made up of tiny dots. Those dots are put together in a particular order to form a meaningful picture. Every second you watch tv, you see 30 unique pictures! Think of how many pictures are possible on a tv screen.

If we were to select a random image, shouldn't a meaningful picture occasionally come up, given all the different meaningful pictures we see on tv? It's a lot less likely than you think. Consider, meaningful pictures have a lot more order than we realize - the pixels around each other usually have similar colors. Consider that lining up even two pixels side by side with the same color is rare, since TV's have 16 million colors.

Click here to randomly generate a 720x480 picture - DVD resolution. Then try again. And again. It's always scrambled, random and meaningless. Order just does not come from non-order.

Note:A chance of there being a meaningful picture does not mean that after you click the button many times, you will eventually see a meaningful screen. Each click is 100% randomized, so it's not going through a sequence. Consider the chance of randomly lining up 15 cards and having them come out in the right sequence. The chance of doing this simple task randomly is 1 in 1307674368000 (1.30 x 1012). Click here to see how long it would take for this to randomly occour.