Permutation
fig. 01 — documentation, 2013
Permutation is a microcontroller that counts. It computes and displays every possible combination of black and white pixels on a monitor — fifty new images per second, one permutation after the next.
The number of possible images on a display is finite. So when the count is done, every picture will have appeared on this screen: every object, every place, every person, in every imaginable variation.
Until then, the monitor shows what looks like noise — and somewhere in it, with mathematical certainty, every photograph ever taken and all the ones that never will be. The machine keeps its promise. It just needs longer than the universe has existed so far: at fifty images per second, about 7 × 1067 years.
