Personal project / Experiment
Filefossil.
Drop in a file and excavate a skeletal creature from its bytes. Mutate one byte and watch it change.
Open project Live in a browser
My work
Byte analysis, the procedural anatomy system and the mutation interaction.
Working with
JavaScript · File API · Canvas
Inside the build
What kind of creature lives inside a file?
Context
A small edit to a large file should visibly change its creature without rereading every byte.
How it works
Incremental histograms and a polynomial hash track changes to the file. Entropy, repeated bytes and header signatures shape the creature’s anatomy.
In the work
The captured specimen comes from the bundled synthetic atlas.zip sample. A reader can mutate bytes and see the anatomy respond.
- Structure
- Header signatures, repetition and entropy provide different anatomical signals.
- Responsiveness
- Incremental statistics keep one-byte mutations from requiring a full rescan.
