While I was down an internet rabbit hole, I saw a display of tiny monochrome pixel sprites. They looked so cute and I marvelled at their diversity given the small surface area. And that got me thinking:
if you had a 32x32 pixel square, how many different icons could you make, provided you had to use a minimum of 1 pixel and a maximum of all 1,024?
Sadly my maths isn’t as good at it used to be so I had to look it up and someone had a similar question.
In an article called “The Realm of Finite Possibilities”, A.G. started with a 4x4 square and managed to get 16 different combinations, or , where 2 is the number of options (having a black or white square) and 4 are the total number of squares you can fill.
So when you branch out to 32, that’d give you (because we don’t want a blank square) which equals… a very large number with 309 digits. Here’s one of the possible icons:
That blew my mind and that was before I considered a colour palette beyond black and white. Of course, most of those combinations would be “noisy” but the fact that you can create so many from a small 32x32 pixel grid is incredible.
Really puts our existence into perspective.
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