Autoglyph #106

How this glyph was made

New to Autoglyphs? Start with Understand.

Every Autoglyph is built on-chain from one number by a short, fixed piece of code. No image is stored. Here is that code run with this glyph’s own numbers, step by step.

1. 1

   Start from the seed

   Every glyph begins as one number, its seed, fixed when it was minted. This glyph’s seed is 0x00000000000000000000000020ddfca4c95aaacedbfc3e7bfd0e92a03777b490. Change the seed and you get a completely different glyph.

2. 2

   Hash it to a

   A seed is just a chosen number, and on its own it would let someone steer the result. Hashing it with keccak256, a standard scrambling method, turns it into a wild, evenly spread number that no one can predict or engineer. That scrambled number is a: 0x4ccfb6b65fb5e021a1e7f151802c9781703b6e3e. That is why two nearby seeds produce completely different glyphs.

3. 3

   Pick the symbol scheme

   The scheme decides which characters the glyph is drawn with. Here, a leaves a remainder of 66 when divided by 83 (written a % 83 = 66). That number, 83, is a row of slots shared among the 10 schemes, and a’s remainder lands in one of them: 66 falls in scheme 5’s slot. Scheme 5 draws with O|-, and it sits on a middling share, about 9 slots out of 83.

4. 4

   Set the density

   The mod sets how often a cell inks: a higher mod leaves more blanks, a lower one fills more in. Here mod = (a % 11) + 5 = 1 + 5 = 6, low in the range (5 to 15), which is why this glyph is dense: 2092 of its 4,096 cells are marked.

5. 5

   Set the symmetry

   Before the grid is filled, it is folded so it mirrors, which is why no Autoglyph is a random mess. Two more reads of a set the folds: a % 2 = 0, so instead of a left-to-right fold the grid is mirrored across its diagonal. So this glyph is diagonally symmetric. The mirror is built in and real, but this glyph’s slash or bar characters flip when mirrored, so the picture can read as off balance. See when the mirror hides.

6. 6

   Fill the grid

   Only now does the code draw. It walks all 64 by 64 cells, combining each cell’s position with a to pick a character or leave it blank. The same arithmetic produced all 512 glyphs; only the seed changed.

A curiosity: every glyph’s seed was chosen by its minter and passed to the contract, where it is hashed, so the seed cannot steer the result; the scheme, density and symmetry all fall out of the hash. Most minters used a throwaway number, but a few chose seeds with meaning. Autoglyph #337 was minted with the seed 1123581321, the start of the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21) written as a single number, and #198 with the round number 200. The look still came from the hash, not the chosen seed, so a meaningful seed is a signature, not a steering wheel.