here’s a question i’ve been chewing on in various forms; i’m interested both in responses and different ways the question may have been framed/answered before https://twitter.com/pixelflipping/status/1542195418670546945

what is a pixel if not bits?

Presumably everything would have implicit location, and also be considered relative to other information Any physical characteristics available for free, like color and brightness, would be metadata that could take on vast new connotations We'd presume all information was in a larger frame and context, and that itself had characteristics important to each pixel itself (whether the 'picture' was coherent or stochastic)

To clarify terms, by pixel you mean three arrays, one each for RGB, and a fourth containing X/Y co-ordinates on a 2D grid (which could be a screen, or presumably could be abstracted?) Or other things? I’m not sure how other primitive things necessary to make this work in the fashion described, like neighbour calculations, would be crafted in pixel-terms, or if the “instead of bits” interpretation is a bit too limiting. If you’re interested in computing on a spatial grid, in which cells can contain color information, though, you might find agent-based modeling frameworks an interesting place to start. A lot of our basic example sims in HASH are around things like color passing: https://hash.ai/models?query=color&sort=relevance&page=1 Some docs at https://hash.ai/docs/simulation if you want to have a play. It’s all free, and mostly open

Don't all bits have a context through which they are interpreted? Pixels are no different and fall under this perspective, they are after all just bits. I just don't see how CS theory would work if bits were replaced with pixels, or how computation in silicon would work, because in the end, the bits are really an abstraction over the physics run in hardware

@Tony Worm hence why either could serve as a base representation tool. however, although there’s no such thing as a purely ‘abstract’ bit, it sure feels that way based on how i’ve experienced CS. i think it’d be harder to hide the underlying physics (and other implicit contexts) with pixels. @Chris G haha speaking my language @David Wilkinson (HASH) leaving the definition open ended, since there are many ways to approach it. but if pixels were the fundamental unit of information, i imagine the definition would have something to do with samples over space & time, with rgb sensors/displays as a special case. basically, in real systems, tensors (and tensor fields) are more fundamental than disembodied bits, and pixels (in the usual sense) carry a lot of that intuition for free. definitely a fan of the direction of HASH!

Pixels, having a spatial component, can carry out diffusionary processes such as in https://home.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/OOPSLA06antiobjects.pdf. Really interesting paper IMO.