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When Phillip Bump heard about the recently discovered 17-million-digit prime number—the world’s biggest!—he decided to celebrate. So he took it and, six digits at a time, converted it into RGB. The result is strangely compelling. [Phillip Bump via Boing Boing]
The World's Newest, Longest Prime Number Is Over 17 Million Digits Long
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NOT strangely compelling.
Errrrrr No…
So he took a massive range of seemingly random numbers, converted them to colour and got noise…
Amazing.
It’s a nice idea, and I’m sure there are other numbers which this would be more interesting for. Prime numbers aren’t that.
I don’t understand how it’s a consistent shade of grey all the way across the image
That’s the worst Magic Eye picture ever
“The result is strangely compelling.”
The prime is a stream of numbers lacking order, it’s always going to look like noise, hardly compelling.
All we need is for someone to verify it. I’ll make a control picture with photoshop noise.
I was just thinking that. I just verified the whole thing and he’s miles off. It’s all bullshit….
Oh bugger it! Then I was all – wait a second, is he using 8bit RGB? Isn’t that a nine digit value?
Dammit, I need to start again. Hang tough guys, I’m on it.
Hang on…. click the link that’s not even the whole picture.
And he’s using 6bit RGB. Is that even a colour system? This is going to take my whole damn morning.
You would only need to use a 4 bit colour palette – as 4 bits would give you 16 colours – and each colour needs to represent the numbers from 0 to 9.
Does make you wonder about ways and places that data can be stored, visualised and perhaps most importantly hidden.