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What's in Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte, Zettabyte, and
Yottabyte? Lets find out.
Hi My name is Emily and this is BlinkPopShift.
Lets start small. What the smallest program ever written? Well it depends on how you define
program but there are some pretty tiny linux executables out there. True.asm is a stand
alone binary gate that returns a one or zero depending on if you name it true or false.
Its a minescule 45 bytes wrapper and all. Thats an impressive feat but its not much
to look at. If we step up to a few kilobytes the demoscene can provide some of the smallest
real-time audiovisuals ever made.
Back in the early days of 8 and16 bit computers software cracking was all the rage and crackers
liked to add their own flair to the start up of software they'd help liberate. These
became known as demos and to this day demosceners are building custom tools to pack ever more
code into a miniscule 4 kilobyte limit.
This procedurally-generated landscape of fractals, titled with a collection of letters I'm not
going to embarrass myself by trying to pronounce, was made by Demoscene Passivist and took 1st
place at Revision, a huge demoscene competition held in Germany, in 2012.
Four kilobytes. That's about the same number of bits we'd use today to store the script
for this video. Just the letters mind you, no formatting, no font or readable file type,
just the characters. Even its own YouTube video is larger than the demo itself.
So we can crunch an amazing amount of code into a very small space but what about the
other extreme? As of now the largest photo ever was made was this panoramic shot of London
which measures a behemoth 320 gigapixels. The largest single torrent file? A 746 GB
collection of all the 2010 World Cup soccer matches.
With file sizes like that it shouldn't be surprising that from just 2011 to 2012 there
was a 48 percent increase in the amount of overall data, bringing our worldwide total
to 2.7 zettabytes. Zetta with a Z. Thats 2.7 followed by 21 zeros and by 2020 projections
suggest that we will be swimming in a 35 zettabyte world. What is all of it? Well currently 90
percent of the world's data is unstructured: digital video, audio files, images, games,
and other media that pose a huge challenge to search and retrieval. A challenge which
just in case you missed it we talked about in this video on why search sucks and what
we are doing to fix it.
35 zetta bytes seems like alot but how much data do I contain by comparison?
With its 6×10^9 base pairs, and 4 base pairs per 8 bit byte the information storage capacity
of the human genome is about 1.5 Gigabytes. Not much. But if my whole body, and its 100
trillion cells, were read write? Then I'm made of 150 Zettabytes of highly redundant,
self organizing information.
So where are we going to put it all? Sure, Moores law, the observation that the number
of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years, might get all
of the press, but remember this little atom scale animation done by IBM last year? The
technology that made this video possible is being used to push the current limits of digital
data concentration, much like we want to pack more computation in a smaller and smaller
area, similar patterns of improvement are happening in bit storage as well. All those
improvements in computation mean access is easier than storage, "the cloud" (finger quotes)
is becoming an ever more ubiquitous feature and why companies like Seagate are inventing
things like shingled magnetic recording to break current capacity barriers. We have made
so much progress in storage in fact that 5TB drives will be available this year! 5TB. To
put that in perspective IBM's Watson won Jeopardy accessing just four terabytes of information.
What can we do will all this new capacity?
Make art where bigger is always better of course. Take Black MIDI. Black MIDI is a genre
of electronic music so dense with notes images of the music notated on standard sheet look
almost redacted. This information density makes for some amazing listening but beyond
just making fantastically complex maximalist music Blackers compete to compose works with
higher and higher note counts. The current top ranking song is an arrangement of Bad
Apple by Gingeas featuring 280 billion notes, billions and billions, so many in fact that
it is completely unplayable by todays computers.
The songs than can be played are handed over to guitar hero esk learn to play piano simulation
software. Some songs play through fine but as note counts grow eventually the songs out
strip the softwares capacities. And this is where black midi gets really fun. You get
to watch the system break down which brings software, that so often overlooked of instruments,
to the foreground. If you want to know more about the art of the glitch check out Idea
Channels video on the topic. But suffices to say, because the malfunction isn't binary,
either working or blue screened, these are artists bringing broken is beautiful out the
nostalgic past and giving us a peek at the limits of our ever faster ever more data dense
machines.
But what do you think?
How will rising storage capacities influence unstructured data online and do you know any
artists that are up to the challenge of 5 tb drives?
You can find me @emilyeifler, and as always thank you for watching, and get curious.