Tag Archives: RandomArt

Drinking games in Vatican: Implementing the SSH RandomArt-Algorithm in Javascript

I recently read an article about the algorithm used to generate the RandomArt-Images used for SSH keys (the “drunken bishop” algorithm). I looked around for a bit and did not find an implementation in Javascript, so I quickly hacked one together.

The algorithm is explained really well in the article I linked above, so I’ll not go over it again. The algorithm is pretty easy to implement, the main parts of this algorithm are:

  • Representing the field the bishop moves on (easy enough with a 2D array of integers)
  • Converting Hex to binary (surprisingly, there is no builtin function for that, but there is a good answer on StackOverflow to that)
  • Isolating the bit-pairs (by iterating through two-character substrings of the words)
  • Checking if moves are valid (by checking if the target coordinates are within the limits of the array)
  • Showing the results (by writing them into a div with a monospaced font set)

So, all in all, it was mostly an exercise in javascript and nothing really fancy, but it was fun to implement it, debug it (too much python, forgetting semicolons all over the place), get the whitespaces to work properly (there are about one million kinds of white spaces, and appearently only one does what I want), and finally testing it.

No effort was made to keep this code simple, efficient, or beautiful to look at. It was a proof of concept and some exercise for my rusty JavaScript skills, mixed with a general interest on how the RandomArt algorithm works.

You can take a look at the code in action at jsfiddle, or just look at the horrible code in the gist on github and make fun of me in the comments.