Will we ever run out of them?
In: Mathematics
A QR code doesnt point to a reference that contains a message, it contains the whole message.
As such, the limit of a QR code with a fixed message length is tantamount to asking how many possible words/sentences can be created using a fixed amount of characters.
If you need a longer message in a QR code, the QR code is larger.
It’s incredibly unlikely to run out. The number of possibilities is incomprehensiby big…..like grains of sand on a beach big
I think I read that there are more possible QR Code combinations than there are atoms in the known universe.
A quick Google search shows that there are 2^23624 or about **3.4*10^7111**.
For reference, there are approximately 10^82 atoms in the known universe. So yeah, there’s an unfathomable # of QR Code combinations.
If you count every possible QR code – you get a number with more than 7000 digits.
For comparison – the number of atoms in the observable universe has about 80 digits.
So don’t worry about running out of them.
QR codes are more a family of formats: there’s different sizes, and essentially, they’re just ways of storing bits of information. Their storage capacity for data depends on this size, and the format of the data (understandably, numeric takes up a lot less space/pixels than ASCII, for example).
One of the common QR formats used for larger bits of information are 57×57 (version 10), which can encode 174 characters, though on the higher side (version 40), QR codes can encode 4,296 alphanumeric or 7,089 number digits per code.
Basically you’re not numbering them, you might literally just be writing a number, web address, or something of the sort into QR code format. And the possibilities within that space is just all possible values for that specific version’s size/format.
A standard QR code can hold 3 kB of data. Which is about 1.5 pages of text. Which is about 2 to the power of 24000 possibilities. I can’t find a calculator that will give me an estimate, but it’s a number with several thousand digits long. Way more than number is atoms in the observable universe.
~10^7089. That’s a 1 with 7 thousand 0’s after it. Which is a number so ridiculously large it might as well be infinite on a human level. For context there are ~10^80 atoms in the entire universe.
This answer also varies a lot depending on what kind of QR code you are using. Because surprise, there are multiple types of QR codes. They will all look pretty similar to human eyes but the differences are with how small they can be and how much error correction is included. But for the biggest codes with minimal error correction they max out at that 10^7089 number.
That is not how it works.
“QR code” just means “a set of rules for turning text into a picture and back again”.
If you put the words “Hello World” through those rules, the result will be a specific QR code. Anyone else who also puts those same words through those rules will also get the same picture.
There is nothing to “run out of”. That’s like saying “will we ever run out of numbers?”.
QR codes can be massive or tiny. They also directly encode the data. The QR code with the largest amount of data in it has almost 2 kilobytes in it. The way it encodes text, that is 4296 characters (letters, numbers, and punctuation). In fact, this whole comment could be encoded as a QR code with room to spare, since there are only 355 characters in it.
A QR code can encode maximum 2953 bytes of data, that’s a lot to the point that it’s not worth asking how many variations it is, it’s more than enough.
Problem is, that maximum size QR code is really big and also hard to read in anything but absolutely ideal conditions. For practical identifying codes you are limited to versions of the code with much less data in them. In fact even the smallest QR code is too big for many applications and formats like DataMatrix are extensively used that can do the same job with less dots. You should try to think in terms of what is the least number of dots you can get the job done with.
One amusing format which unfortunately only has a matlab implementation available is this for example [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0136487](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0136487)
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