I am a little curious about the cute little kaleidoscopic images associated with each user on this site. How are those generated? Possibilities are:
In any case, I am more interested in what kind of algorithm is used to generate such images.
IIRC, it's generated from an IP address.
"IP Hashing" I believe it's called.
I remember reading about it on a blog; he made the code available for download. I have no idea where it was from, however. :(
Its usually generated from a hash of either a user name, email address or ip address.
Stackoverflow uses Gravatar to do the image generation.
As far as I know the idea came from Don Parks, who writes about the technique he uses.
It's called an Identicon. If you entered and e-mail, it's a based on a hash of your e-mail address. If you didn't enter an e-mail, it's based on your IP address.
Jeff posted some .NET code to generate IP based Identicons.
The images are produced by Gravatar and details of them are outlined here, however, they do not reveal how they are doing it.
I believe the images are a 4×4 grid with the upper 2×2 grid repeated 4 times clockwise, just each time rotated 90 degrees, again clockwise. Seems the two colours are chosen randomly, and each 1×1 block is chosen from a predefined set.
EDIT: obviously my answer was ad hoc. Nice to know about identicons.
Try this: http://www.docuverse.com/blog/9block?code=(32-bit integer)8&size=(16|32|64)
substituting appropriate numbers for the parenthesized items.
I bet each tiny tile image is given a set of other tile images it looks good with. Think of a graph with the tiles as nodes. You pick a random node for the corner and fill it's adjacent spots with partners, then rotate it and apply the same pattern four times. Then pick a color.
Instead of a graph, it could also be a square matrix in which each row represents an image, each column represents an image, and cell values are weights.