How today's computers can indeed allow us to visually time travel.

What an interesting idea. I completely see your point. As a computer programmer, I see how easy it is to make the code; and that it needs SERIOUS refinement before it's "usable"...so I start thinking "how could it be improved"?

Here are my answers to that last:
* A number of different "refinements" will be needed to provide usable images...maybe as early as 4 or 5 generations from now!
* start with black-and-white images
* start with a small image space (the 2x2 image makes sense)
* multi-tasking will probably help a lot...
* have computer-aided recognition of "candidates"
+ facial recognition
+ geographic recognition (don't know if such a thing exists at the moment)
+ spacial (yes, spacial...as in pictures of space...I'm guessing it's a made-up word recognition
+ scale down a library of "known good" pictures (say, every scene for a movie, or a video game...or a collection of such; maybe even include artwork?) and use these as "exemplars" and set a "similarity threshold" (this should not be used on it's own, because it will probably strip out "pictures" that are legitimate, but unlike anything imagined or captured by a camera)


* when "candidates" are found:
+ show them to a human being and use that feedback with a neural net to refine the definition of "useful"
+ run them through a "refiner" - add colors, pixels or both
+ run "refined" images through the "candidate selection" and the "when found" mechanisms.

With today's computers, I'm pretty sure we could actually process 10 images per second (that's a conservative estimate...I'm sure we're not far from being able to process 100 images per second!)

Just adding in my thoughts for a "better way" to do this. Strictly a thought experiment for me...I'm too lazy and too busy with other ideas to do anything about it!

Reminds me of the old hypothesis: that if you took a massive number of monkeys banging away on an equally massive number of typewriters, statistically they would eventually produce a copy of Hamlet. (Or something like that.)

reply to post by theGleep


What exactly would be the interest in looking at randomly generated images? If you're going to go through all that effort of preprocessing (again, pointless) you might as well just synthesize the images algorithmically in the first place. As to what ends... you won't get any more of a glimpse into the future than you would staring at noise or tea leaves all day. A random image is nothing more than interpreting random numbers as visual information. An analogy would be that rolling a dice does not tell you anything about the future Stock Exchange