A little while ago I came across this Snowflake generator. It’s a project by Raph Levein that takes a hash string and uses it to procedurally generate a unique snowflake. He explains that the original motivation was as a cryptographically secure visual hash, so that people would reliably be able to tell by visual inspection whether two hashes were identical. I thought that was a pretty cool idea. Having someway to quickly tell if two similar strings were distinct has some real benefits. But...
