Octohash fingerprints

[dvgrn]

Is the logo going to be an octopus?

I asked an AI image generator to make an octopus-holding-a-glider logo, but it had the hardest time figuring out what a glider looked like. I ended up having to add the glider in manually.

icon-octoplus-or-minus.png (23.13 KiB) Viewed 177 times

At that point -- mid-November last year, going on a year ago already -- I had decided to get started on the project of setting up a online octohash search tool. The local text-based databases were really only ever supposed to be a proof of concept of the usefulness of the idea. At the cost of some additional hard drive space for indexes, searches could become practically instantaneous.

Some More Details about Next Steps
When hashes get re-generated for the octo3g database, it will be a big improvement to start from confocaloid's reworked data, 3G-collisions-tested-and-rewound-16-ticks.zip, instead of the current octo3g database, which has quite a lot of duplicates in it.

Also, if some of the octohashes are going to get re-generated anyway, I think it's worth seriously considering the idea of abandoning Python as the scripting language for these octohash lookup scripts -- and also abandoning the overly complicated SHA-1-based hashing function. A Lua script can perfectly well calculate a Fowler-Noll-Vo hash function, for example.

These days ChatGPT can very easily convert current Python Octoplus code to Lua, and patch in the Fowler-Noll-Vo hash function. So then we'd have an octoplus search system that would work on any modern copy of Golly, without the requirement of an additional Python install.