The secret of the OpenStreetMap logo. What do the numbers inside the magnifier mean?

I think I'm not the only one who has asked the above question at least once. After all, it can not be that the numbers for the logo were chosen absolutely randomly and mean nothing. This short note will explain why units and zeros are arranged in this way, and in no other way.

It so happened that I now live in London, and at one of the meetings of OSM participants I managed to talk to the creator of the logo (the user Matt ), finding out everything, so to speak, from the original source.


Carefully look at the numbers. You do not need to be a genius to notice that they repeat every three lines and every four columns. Select the following block:

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Now - the most interesting: you need to understand what meaning the block contents contains. My hypotheses were originally the number 42 and the letters "OSM", encoded in the binary system, but none of the options in the end did not fit. The answer was given by Mat himself. It turns out that this is a glider from the “Life” game . By unit here is meant a living cell, and by zero is dead.

Glider belongs to the class of moving figures. This is how it changes from generation to generation:


You can try to try the glider yourself on any of the online simulators, for example, on this: secretgeek.net/gameoflife_.asp

And now another question that arises when answering the first one: where is some kind of glider? Everything is very simple. The glider from the game "Life" is present on the emblem of hackers , which looks like this:


It was this symbol that brought Mat to the OpenStreetMap logo, reflecting it vertically.

Do not confuse the concept of "hacker" and "computer hacker". A hacker is not the one who opens someone else's VKontakte pages, but the one who is recognized as a highly qualified IT specialist, a guru in his work. By the way, the OpenStreetMap project sometimes hosts the so-called Hack Days - a meeting of volunteer developers. Unlike kartovecherinok and just meetings in bars, the development of the project is discussed and the code is written. The next such event will be in April in London and will last two days.

^{The text of the article is licensed under CC-BY 2.0 / 3.0 . The last two images are taken from Wikipedia.}