Creating Mona Lisa by means of paintball pistol

8th September 2008

Jamie and Adam from the popular programme MythBusters demonstrated the difference between creating images using a conventional processor, consistently processing the command, and a graphic accelerator that can perform many commands simultaneously. The experiment was carried out specifically for the company Nvidia, actively advertising its powerful graphics processors with parallel processing of data and commands.
With the help of a powerful Ã¢â‚¬Å“graphic acceleratorÃ¢â‚¬Â and glycerin balls with paint for paintball they were able to recreate a portrait of Mona Lisa by legendary Leonardo da Vinci for only 80 milliseconds. Of course, in reality parallel calculations are much more complicated than it was shown in MythBusters but out of all television experiments this one proved the most eloquent, so that technical inaccuracies can be easily neglected.
To show the work of a conventional processor Jamie and Adam used an average paintball gun equipped into a manageable from a computer platform. Sequent shots from a pistol were able to draw a smiley, but it took over 10 seconds. By means of the parallel processing they draw a good picture for 80 ms after turning on the system. Just amazing!