I understand that this discusses recognizing paint splatters as characters with a given "optical character recognition" program, which seems disposed to almost always recognize pain as some combination of characters. Of the many possible ways this could be realized, this is absolutely welcome and in the spirit.

However, it did give me the initial impression about other possible ways to do this, such as taking patches of color and empty space as 0s and 1s, and the totality of it as a program. I think the vast majority of those cases would be pointless noise.

So there's two extremes, one with mostly noise, one with mostly meaning. I suppose the game-within-the-game here is to find what form of interpretation does the most to credit paint splatters with the most possible meaning where, to the greatest extent possible, the meaning truly comes from the structure and not from how aggressive the rules are at choosing to see meaning.