Create a Robot Image from any text string

by e1ven • 15 years ago

319 101 15 years ago

e1ven27• 15 years ago

Morning, I created this as an extended-weekend project, after realizing that I'd need these hashes as a part of larger project I'm working on.

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.

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

What are the odds of a collision? How many unique elements are there that can make up a robot?

e1ven27• 15 years ago

If you use all three sets, and enable backgrounds, the collision chance is much lower.

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"

vladev• 15 years ago

Any chance of open-sourcing this? :)

e1ven27• 15 years ago

vladev- Sure. It's on Github; Written in Python + Tornado. If you're interested, email me.

I'd rather clean it up, but if you're a Python guy, you could help ;)

donpark4• 15 years ago

Robohash looks great. As the 'inventor' of Identicon, I've been meaning to revisit the subject with animal (identimal) or robot (identibot) themes in mind so it's nice to see your rendition of the later. Well done, sir.

e1ven27• 15 years ago

Identicons are a great idea, I really love them.. They're a good solution to a gut-check "Something is wrong here.."

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 ;)

celoyd4• 15 years ago

This is extremely well done.

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.

e1ven27• 15 years ago

Sorry, too late to edit the comment now, HN won't let me anymore. I was using man generically, not specifically. Mankind, if you will.

s/man/person

andrewcooke2• 15 years ago

this is cute. if anyone is looking for a more abstract approach i threw some code together a year ago that generates colourful "mosaics" - http://www.acooke.org/hash-icons.html (i really need to improve the page and release the code...)

e1ven27• 15 years ago

I love the mosiacs; They remind me of a prettier version of identicons.

My concern was just that people won't remember a random pattern of dots very well.

andrewcooke2• 15 years ago

yeah, i agree. on the other hand, they go smaller - i was looking for something that would label users on a feed of short comments.

melvinmt2• 15 years ago

Wow, this looks indeed way better than identicons. I'll email you to enquire about the code.

MattBearman2• 15 years ago

I love this, simply because http://robohash.org/mattbearman kinda looks like me :D

My one criticism is that it took me while to figure out (and I'm web dev) It wasn't clear until quite far down the page that you need to just put the text string after the URL.

I'd recommend having a text box into which pasted text can be robohashed prominent on the homepage, as well as clearer instructions.

Edit: just noticed there is a text box, was that there before? It could definitely be more noticeable :)

e1ven27• 15 years ago

I have added a box in the Last 5 minutes based on user-feedback. It's kinda a hack, but.. It's there ;)

MattBearman2• 15 years ago

Ah cool, its good to see you respond quickly to feedback

praptak• 15 years ago

It's similar to the StackOverflow April Fools' Unicorn Avatars: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/37328/my-godits-full...

Which you can try out at: http://unicornify.appspot.com/use-it

e1ven27• 15 years ago

Woah, That's really cool! I hadn't seen that, but yes, it's designed to be along the same idea, except more year-round friendly ;)

nawariata• 15 years ago

    Dr. Chandra, RobotCrunch

Subtle jab at Arrington? =)

e1ven27• 15 years ago

The Testimonials, and the hover-text on the robots change on every reload. Try it! Hammer the site more ;)

evilswan• 15 years ago

OMG - π-bot has a cylindrical head! http://robohash.org/3.14159

e1ven27• 15 years ago

That's an awesome coincidence. Now I'll have to check for others ;)

vijaydev3• 15 years ago

Looks better than Tau-bot :)

http://static1.robohash.com/6.28318

meric2• 15 years ago

They do have the same smile.

tibbon• 15 years ago

Any open/permissive license on the output and/or code?

e1ven27• 15 years ago

CC BY 3.0 on the Images, BSD on the code.

billpg• 15 years ago

Who should I attribute as the creator of the robot images? You, the website, or the author of the hashed plain-text?

jawns• 15 years ago

So THIS is what the Googlebot looks like!

http://robohash.org/google

e1ven27• 15 years ago

He's So friendly!

Klinky• 15 years ago

Bing just looks like a goofy hipster.

http://robohash.org/bing

cappaert• 15 years ago

Anyone else notice the Microsoft bot has a 7 (as in Windows 7) on its head?

http://robohash.org/microsoft

erikwiffin2• 15 years ago

It would be awesome if http://robohash.org/google.jpg generated a jpg, and http://robohash.org/google.png generated a png.

It would be even more awesome if http://robohash.org/favicon.ico generated a .ico file.

e1ven27• 15 years ago

Google.jpg does generate a jpg, but it's not the same as google.png;

The reason for that is that I'm hashing whatever you send in, including the extension.. Otherwise, if you passed file.txt and file.mp3 they'd come to the same hash.

erikwiffin2• 15 years ago

I realize what you're doing. This was more of a "really cool feature request" than a bug report.

favicon.ico does respond with a 404 though.

agscala• 15 years ago

You could make an exception for .jpg and .png and only hash the part to the left of the dot otherwise hash the whole thing!

meric2• 15 years ago

http://robohash.org/google.gif generated a .gif file!

FrankBlack• 15 years ago

I think this is broken. I entered, "Bite my shiny, metal ass!" and all I got was some weird, Barney-like purple robot. I'd suggest special sub-routines for certain phrases including, but not limited to: "Ex-Ter-Mi-NATE!", "Danger, Will Robinson!", "Crush, Kill, Destroy!", "Beedeebeedeebeedeebeedee!", "We've got movie sign!", "Blah, blah, blah", "I'll be back", etc.

;)

e1ven27• 15 years ago

For 2.0, I'll add ?popculture=yes ;)

j79• 15 years ago

Hah, that'd be awesome! One of the first strings I tried was "bender". Considering how fast the image loaded, I'm guessing it was already cached from other users doing the same :)

tptacek• 15 years ago

You write really good web site copy.

e1ven27• 15 years ago

Thank you, that's very kind of you to say. The whole project is very silly, so it doesn't make much sense to take it very seriously ;)

MartinCron• 15 years ago

I'm impressed that you got an endorsement from Cave Johnson. It must be nice having friends like that.

wicknicks• 15 years ago

Wow! Very nice morning treat :-)

R2D2 and C3P0 look like this:

http://robohash.org/c3p0.png http://robohash.org/r2d2.png

C3P0's got horns!!

e1ven27• 15 years ago

I'm surprised no one's posted anything from set2 or set3, or included any backgrounds ;)

jonovos• 15 years ago

Strange. No matter WHAT STRING I ENTER, it ALWAYS creates the SAME robot. Is this site just a psychological experiment designed to collect user names??

e1ven27• 15 years ago

Were you in Firefox, by chance? There was a difference in the FF evaluates the JS, versus Webkit, when retrieving document.form, so I switched it to getelementbyid.

capnrefsmmat• 15 years ago

What sort of "Super-Awesome new forum" is this for?

melipone• 15 years ago

I like it but shouldn't it do similarity instead of producing a unique bot? For example, "similar" strings should produce similar bots.

e1ven27• 15 years ago

I'm generating the bots by reading the bits from a SHA1 hash, so they won't be very similar on an english-text level.

rcfox• 15 years ago

Usually, a hash function is explicitly designed to have very different output for similar input.

jjclarkson• 15 years ago

The similarity between http://robohash.org/yes

and http://robohash.org/no

is striking.

w43l• 15 years ago

there's something wrong with the algorithm, the yes guy looks like he's saying no

wbhart• 15 years ago

If I put a % anywhere in the string (except at the end where I think it is ignored) it doesn't give me my robot, but a broken link!

e1ven27• 15 years ago

It's doing a URL decode to store them. I think that a % is not valid in a URL..

From http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_URI_Recommentations.html-

The percent sign ("%", ASCII 25 hex) is used as the escape character in the encoding scheme and is never allowed for anything else.

I'll try to see why it's not converting it after work.

alttag• 15 years ago

Same problem with a string of just spaces. It seems the string being hashed isn't URL-encoded first.

carbocation• 15 years ago

If/when you debut the [robohash] watermark in the image, it would be great if you would also debut a paid plan without the watermark. Plus, paid plans give people confidence that your service will continue to exist.

e1ven27• 15 years ago

I think it would be pretty silly to add a paid plan to a weekend project. ;)

I'll only do that, with the watermark, if it goes over what my bottom-rung Linode+CDN can deliver.

melvinmt2• 15 years ago

It's not silly for people who are actually using this. I'd rather pay for the service than living with the uncertainty of getting a banner because you can't pay your CDN bills. That's really the only thing that prohibits me from using this service in anything useful anyway. It looks very nice so that clearly would be a waste.

LXicon2• 15 years ago

if you go to http://static1.robohash.com/ you get the same page as http://robohash.org/ but the IP used is not my IP.

nice project though. :)

e1ven27• 15 years ago

Static1.robohash.com goes through the CDN.. If you load a PNG through there, it's cached. I wouldn't do the whole site through there, though, or you'll get the CDN's IP!

LXicon2• 15 years ago

i figured it was something like that but i felt i should mention it just in case.

your concept did a good job in alerting me that the IP that was supposed to me mine was not :)

rhdoenges2• 15 years ago

I love some of the alt-text on the robots. Very polished.

e1ven27• 15 years ago

That was my favorite part. There are a few fun bits scattered around the webpage.

rhdoenges2• 15 years ago

also the robots in the source code!

Luc• 15 years ago

Very very nice. This has convinced me to use this technique for non-player characters in a game I am working on. I see you licensed the artwork from three artists. Did you have it especially drawn for you, or was it already released under some CC license?

e1ven27• 15 years ago

I had it drawn for the project at 99designs.

gokhan• 15 years ago

What was your design brief for this? The results are so cool, so should the brief.

tomatohs• 15 years ago

An easy way to flip the images left and right would be great. I love the first set of robots, but I wouldn't use them in my website as they'd be placed on the far left of the browser window, looking away from the page.

JoshRu• 15 years ago

you could always use css: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/flip-an-image/

aquark• 15 years ago

This is brilliant.

We have a stress testing tool that uses little images of various robots in its UI to represent different test patterns ... now I can automate them!

ayanb• 15 years ago

The Html source has a random robot as part of the author signature. This is neat!

cwe• 15 years ago

Sad to see Bender in this state: http://static1.robohash.com/bender

vog• 15 years ago

I find it pretty clever to generate Robot faces rather than whole robots or other pictures. Human brains are optimized for face recognition, which is why we can tell even minor differences in faces far easier than minor differences in other pictures.

Therefore, generating human faces would serve this purpose even better, but those are at risk of falling into the uncanny valley. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

Using clearly non-human faces (such as Robot faces) avoids that problem.

spyder• 15 years ago

I quickly made a bookmarklet to robotize HN usernames:

  javascript:(document.body.innerHTML=document.body.innerHTML.replace(/<a href="user\?id=([^"]+)">([^<]+)<\/a>/g,'<a href="user?id=$1"><img src="http://robohash.org/$2?size=24x24">$2</a>'))()

gus_massa• 15 years ago

It has a problem with the current and parent directory links. (I don't know if it's possible to fix.)

http://robohash.org/. (doesn't work)

http://robohash.org/.. (doesn't work)

http://robohash.org/... (does work!)

Create a Robot Image from any text string

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