Basically, Text goes in, Picture of a Robot comes out.
Where I'm using this is sort of like an identicon, to help quickly identify a poster's 4096-bit public keys, and see if you're talking to the same man.
Is it perfect? No, but it's a quick visual guide to any text, in the form of faces, which are easy for people to remember.
Sort of like a SSH-fingerprint.
The problem I've had with them is that they're generate not all that memorable. Was that triangles pointing left, then up, or up then left?
This is my attempt at addressing that problem for my own new project, but I'd love to see what you build! If you want to use these images, feel free. They're CC-BY, so they're open to the world now ;)
Abstract geometric identicons like my original implementation as well as variations used at Wordpress and StackOverflow are, while nearly impossible to remember, distinguishable in a pile which comes in handy when distinguishing the 'voice' of individuals in a long thread of comments.
To use identicons as permanent identity, one has to 'identify' with their identicon. We can identify faces of our friends because we shared memories with them, stories if you will.
So robotic identicons like yours can be made more memorable if users had some ways to create a story they can associate with it like 'blue viking with left arm missing', etc.
But I like the idea. Perhaps the image problem could be met by combining it with a bio (giving a story); and the "make sense" problem could be addressed by a story grammar (following the hero's myth as a template, with recursive and optional parts), written using templates consisting of canned pseudo-english sentences with gaps filled by a set of names, objects, places that play the various roles in the "hero grammar": the key, the sword, the grail, the shadow, the mentor, the ordinary world, the special word, various thresholds - perhaps some word generation for place names. If the story made sense, as a journey, it might be memorable, even stirring in an awkward way, despite all the grammar/template/presets...
Of course, maybe I'm wrong: "<color> <warriortype> with <injury>" is already fairly rich. Even, extending it to incongruous occupations (surgeon, nurse, motorcyclist, developer). Perhaps, like theatresports, just starting points of a place, occupation and problem is enough to suggest a story to the user?
Everywhere we look in RL, there are stories being told all the time.
I think an interesting way to apply identicon to certs is to map each cert attributes to an 'attribute' of identicon, visualizing attributes.
Each Robot is made up of 6 sets of 10 choices each, plus backgrounds.
It's not perfect, but it's enough to give you a basic view into "Is this the same guy or not"
So it works well for a simple signal (which is the goal), but shouldn't be relied on if people might try to abuse it.
I could have made up more Random elements, but that'd take more time/money, which isn't worth it unless anyone outside of me actually wants it ;)
I wonder if you could get better results using a markov chain to generate english prose from a large sample. If you take the top N next word options, and select one based on the next log_2(N) bits of your hash/key, you lose no key space and should get a nonsensical but perhaps easily remembered string.
But incidentally:
see if you're talking to the same man
comes across a bit odd, seeing as lately a few women and children have been reported using IP addresses.
s/man/person
If I had corrected the poster’s lack of a final slash in his s/// syntax, I wouldn’t have been implicitly accusing him of being an incompetent programmer, because it’s a common and small mistake that I make too. But perhaps it’s worth pointing out every tenth time one sees it, as a mater of politeness, demonstrating the assumption that the poster cares.
So my purpose was not to say “you monster” but “psst, you missed a spot”, and that’s how he seems to have taken it.
To me, “man” meaning “human” isn’t colloquial at all (except in the slangy sense of don’t have a cow, man) – in fact, it’s stilted at best.
* I checked his profile.
"We were looking for the best for the job" .... and then go on to announce it's a woman. We don't have to be such prudes to be respectful of the other gender.
This isn’t meant as prudery. Would you develop that argument? I’m curious why I’m being downvoted and would like a chance to engage.
I'd rather clean it up, but if you're a Python guy, you could help ;)