TMURPHY@WPI.BITNET (04/09/88)
An elite group of students (commonly known as Wedge Rats) here at WPI today at lunch took up the idea of generating all possible 16x16 icons and co copyrighting them. We concentrated on the problem of mass storage, putting aside the relatively trivial problem of computation. We also limited ourselves to black&white icons. Two storage media were evaluated, mag tape and CD-ROM. It was determined that at a density of 6250 bpi, approximately 1.3E58 lightyears of magtape would be needed to store the raw data. CD-ROMS seemed to provide better storage density, with approximately 2.5E67 CDs reqiured for the data, again in raw format. Storage would present a problem, as assuming perfedt packing, a volume 1E60 times that of the Earth would be needed to store all the disks. We do believe there is enough matter in the observable universe for production, however. An offshoot of this project is the black hole algorithm of data compaction. Details of data extraction await theoretical breakthrough before the first commercial release is expected. ________________________________________________________ Thomas C. Murphy Worcester Polytechnic Institute BITNET: TMURPHY@WPI Arpanet: tmurphy%wpi.bitnet@talcott.harvard.edu