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Wanderer: A Visual Hash Generator

hash project visualisation

Have you ever wondered how the 'randomart' you see when creating an SSH key is generated? Turns out it uses the brilliantly named drunken bishop algorithm. Seeing this inspired me to create my own version: "Wanderer".

Wanderer works by converting each character of the given string into octal (0-7), then mapping each octal character into a step in a direction. Each of these steps is then followed in order, leaving behind a coloured trail/heatmap of visited cells.

Enter some text, update the direction-map (hint: you can leave blanks) and click Generate:

If you're curious about how exactly the image is generated and streamed to the browser, you can take a peek at the source code and have a read of this post.