God's Eye

God's Eye is a Java application that will display every possible black and white image of your chosen size and color depth.

I had this idea a long while ago initially accompanied by some very bad math that had me convinced that in a month's time I could show every image that had ever, or could ever, appear on television. Think of it - Every Single Image Possible. That includes pictures of you, from every angle, doing every thing. There's a picture of you wearing big red rubber boots petting a goat on the moon with teddy bears raining from the sky.

That's infinity.

But the math was way wrong. The number of years it takes to show them all fills a page. Forget about being done by 2010, we're talking about not really even being started by the year 940893579857323468454562985732957...

Then I found out someone else already did it. That's even worse.

So I didn't make it right away, but I kept thinking about writing it. Recently with some free time forced upon me by Hurricane Katrina, I sat down and wrote it so that I could stop thinking about writing it. I named it after the other guy's piece, but made it black and white and very adjustable.

Download it here. It's very small.
Unzip it, if it doesn't happen automatically.
Double click "godseye.jar". (If you're too cool to double click, you're cool enough to know the "java -jar godseye.jar" command.)
Enter a height and width and number of colors.

Start with the defaults to get a sense of how long this takes and what it looks like. Then increase the size until your computer (or really your Java Runtime Environment) runs out of memory and the program crashes. It doesn't take much, which means the program should be written differently. But that won't happen until you promise to watch the whole way through.