Autoglyph #94

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 0x000000000000000000000000f8787ec82f1efd637b253b5d6e31123197169e8b. 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: 0xb8a8750398227497f14d6d8e35c8193fe5873dec. 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 8 when divided by 83 (written a % 83 = 8). That number, 83, is a row of slots shared among the 10 schemes, and a’s remainder lands in one of them: 8 falls in scheme 1’s slot. Scheme 1 draws with X/\, and it is common because its slot is wide, about 20 slots out of 83, so many seeds land there.

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 = 10 + 5 = 15, the top of the range (5 to 15), which is why this glyph is sparse: 810 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.

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.