rtyn mbdx: the mysterious modern art of google image search
January 16, 2019 12:59 AM   Subscribe

Type two random 4 letter ‘words’ into google images and you’ll get a set of abstract art paintings. Why? A reddit forum which tries to identify mystery objects has identified a, er, mystery...

The source seems to be a webpage dedicated to work based on an obscure, 1998 programming language, Malbolge. Or, at least that’s what it claims to be, since it's hard to find much evidence of Malbolge in use on the site. This isn't surprising for a programming language designed to be almost impossible to use, and named after the 8th circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno (that's the one where people who've committed various sins of fraud march around in ditches suffering a variety of torments). Eagle eyed redditors (and others) have spotted that the site’s privacy policy blurb includes an assertion that it is a work of fiction. Is it the remnants of an Augmented Reality Game (NB it turns out not to be part of the Legend of Satoshi Nakamato)? A google test site? Or something more sinister...
posted by AFII (28 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
Technically that's "Malbolge".
posted by flabdablet at 2:18 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


I would like to pretend the typo is part of the ~mystery~ please.
posted by AFII at 2:35 AM on January 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


Googling two random 4-letter strings gets me a lot of newspapers with misprints.
posted by Segundus at 4:42 AM on January 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


Sins of fraud... kind of a clue there, eh?
posted by eviemath at 4:48 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


Type two random 4 letter ‘words’ into google images and you’ll get a set of abstract art paintings. Why? A reddit forum which tries to identify mystery objects has identified a, er, mystery...

posted by AFII (4 comments total) [add to activity] [add to favorites]
Uh, guys, don't look now, but I think the call is coming from inside the house.
posted by Mayor West at 5:04 AM on January 16, 2019 [20 favorites]


As someone with an obsession for four letter clusters, this seemed right up my alley. So I opened up Google Image Search and tried some random letters (rkkr sifq) but only got a bunch of pictures of sofas.

“This is clearly nonsense,” I thought to myself, “probably the Reddit post is just an effort to get attention for this site and maybe an underlying ARG”.

Then, just to make sure, I put another pair of random four letter clusters (pdhh cgjl) and sure enough, Google Image Search returned many pages worth of results from c0d3.attorney.
posted by Kattullus at 5:44 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


So, while two four-letter clusters get you these images pretty often, there is a lot of code posted below the images on each of the landing pages, so a lot of other random letter strings will also get you to them. For example, NLm ORtu$bQE goes here.
posted by beagle at 5:56 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


Modern day replacement for "Numbers Station".
posted by sammyo at 6:17 AM on January 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


Ah, good weird Internet!
posted by Glomar response at 6:29 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


Interestingly, this doesn't work if the two four-letter strings are the same.
posted by slkinsey at 6:44 AM on January 16, 2019


On the .attorney page Ben Olmstead is mentioned as the creator of Malbolge. Here is an interview with him on a site called esoteric codes.

Lots more “clues” there!
posted by notyou at 6:52 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:18 AM on January 16, 2019 [7 favorites]


I am reminded of another esolang called Piet in which the programs are weird multicolored abstract images. But those all stick to grid patterns, not weird geometric shapes.

And just by my intuition, the fact that the images are obviously of overlapping shapes in a visually meaningful way suggests that the abstract images are probably not encodings of data.
posted by vogon_poet at 7:31 AM on January 16, 2019


Technically that's "Malbolge".

Dammit, now that you've spelled it correctly you've called Their attention to us. I hope you have constructed the appropriate protective circles in Spiral.
posted by Nelson at 7:42 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


In the reddit thread there are people figuring out how it works, or at least how to manipulate it. Here’s the subthread with the most information, though there’s slightly more elsewhere on the reddit page too.
posted by Kattullus at 7:48 AM on January 16, 2019


Mod note: Edited the spelling of the dread name in the post.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:02 AM on January 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


When I googled fezf sezr as in that reddit link I indeed got the same abstract paintings but also:
https://imgur.com/a/NDYtTbZ
posted by mit5urugi at 8:08 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


I typed in "sdfg kiuy" and google said "Did you mean: : sdfg kiun?". I'm looking at that right now; will look at previously scheduled mystery later.
posted by acrasis at 8:24 AM on January 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


and tried some random letters (rkkr sifq) but only got a bunch of pictures of sofas

whoa though

s o f a
s i f q

look at the proximity of o/i and a/q on the qwerty keyboard
posted by clavicle at 8:28 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


The correct way to think about Malbolge, I'm convinced, is as a cryptographer and not a programmer. Think of it as a complex code and/or algorithm that transforms input to output. Then study it to see if you can take advantage of its weaknesses to forge a message that produced the output you want.

Looked at as a cryptosystem, it has several weaknesses:
From Lou Scheffer's Malbolge page.

So I'm pretty convinced that this is what it says on the very weird tin.
posted by suetanvil at 9:43 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


Abstract paintings...are we sure cortex isn't behind this?
posted by Chrysostom at 11:04 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


clavicle: whoa though

s o f a
s i f q

look at the proximity of o/i and a/q on the qwerty keyboard


Okay, so I was playing around some more with Google Image Search. Every time I enter sifq plus any two, four or three letter cluster, I get pictures of sofas. This doesn’t work with five letter clusters or above. Just searching for sifq doesn’t get me any sofas, but sifq sifq does. Weird.
posted by Kattullus at 11:06 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


Even more weirdly, sifq wx gets me lots of sofa tables.
posted by Kattullus at 11:08 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


Also, sifq sifq sifq doesn’t result in any sofa pictures, nor does repeating it four times. However, anything above four repetitions results in pictures of sofas, that I’ve tried, anyway. Also, the results for a sifq sifq sifq and sifq sifq sifq sifq are the same, but different from a single sifq.
posted by Kattullus at 11:14 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


Incidentally, and I’ll stop posting about sifq now (I’ve been bedridden with a cold that became a sinus infection for four days now, anything is an interesting distraction) but it seems that in most cases Google assumes that you’re trying to google sofa, but never gives a “did you mean sofa” option. This is stronger in Image Search and Maps than Web Search. I assume that the same goes for a number of other words with routine mistypings, but I haven’t thought of one yet (e.g. cicq cilq just gave me results from our friend c0d3.attorney).
posted by Kattullus at 1:24 PM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


All that jibberish on the page looks like valid Malbolge programs I’ve seen. 11 year old me spent a lot of time with the little devil, a debugger and Usenet one Summer before a genetic algorithm was used to develop the first hello world...
posted by Matt Oneiros at 5:03 PM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


I am apparently bad at typing random 3 letter combinations because I have to try a lot before I get one of these.

But why does it only work with Google and not DDG or Bing?
posted by bongo_x at 11:42 PM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


clavicle: whoa though

s o f a
s i f q

look at the proximity of o/i and a/q on the qwerty keyboard


Google autocorrect really astounds me sometimes - particularly when I accidentally use the wrong keyboard, and it recognises that when I type [سخپثفاهدل مهنث فاهس]* I meant to type [something like this]

*Gibberish in any language, but the same keystrokes as [something like this]
posted by Gordafarin at 2:51 AM on January 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


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