When you create a new social service on the internet, one of the things you need to think about is how to make a user’s space feel like their own. Services like GitHub, Roll20, or Reddit generate — or allow you to generate — a custom avatar (i.e. Identicons) for your account. Avatar auto-generation is especially neat, as it does not require any engagement from the user. Let’s try to figure that out on our own.

Recently I’m investing a lot of time into developing a game server in Rust. I started with implementing network layer based on WebSockets. It’s far from being ready, but I developed a helper crate for creating detached, cancellable services.

Natural Selection is what allows our species (and images!) to improve over time. In this article we’ll implement a scoring mechanism, through which “Mona Lisa” will actually look like one.

In the previous article from this series, we’ve talked about genetic algorithms and how they can be used to generate art. Now let’s put those ideas into action and focus on implementing the first part of our artistic toolset: mutators.