[Original website](https://www.robinsloan.com/special/amulet/) [Amulet Garden](https://at.amulet.garden/) Finding rare amulets became [a secret obsession](https://finding.thebluebook.co.za/three) for a few people in Kernel, mostly from KB3 onwards. We were all fans of Robin Sloan, the creator. Most of us had first encountered him thinking about [home-cooked web apps](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/), which is entirely delightful and a deep rabbit hole we were all very willing to fall down together. While Robin has traditionally been fairly critical of "web3", and NFTs esepcially, he did make an enormously cool little app called "Amulets", whcih attracted the attention of a few amateur script enthusisasts among us. The idea is very simple. You have to craft text that is less than 64 bytes, the SHA-256 hash of which contains a string of consecutive 8's. The more 8's in a row your text produces, the "more rare" the amulet is. It's such a simple set of rules, yet it reveals so much about a critical underlying mechanism of the technology we use every day in a very playful and engaging manner. Hashes are "one way functions": meaning that you can go from text to it's hash, but not the other way around. That is, if I give you a hash, you cannot say what text produced it. >Ostensibly, the hash provides an immutable link between unique cryp­to­graphic object and free-floating digital media. > > The amulet asks: what if we took that link seriously? > > In a sense, the defi­n­i­tion of the SHA-256 hash function created, at a stroke, all amulets of all rarities. Common to mythic, trashy to lovely, they have been hiding in the manifold combi­na­tions of language; we just didn’t know we ought to be looking for them. Until now! I highly recommend the entire "[definition](https://www.robinsloan.com/special/amulet/definition/)" page for the various buggest of insight about what it means to make fun "rules" in a non-dogmatic way that invite people to play, rather than to try and win, or accumulate, or profit. This is my personal favourite part: >And, while this isn’t part of the formal defi­n­i­tion, it’s important to say that an amulet of any rarity should be judged by its overall effect, with consid­er­a­tion for both its linguistic and typo­graphic qualities. In particular, an amulet’s whitespace, punctuation, and diacritics should all be “load bearing”. > >A poem doesn’t become inter­esting simply by satis­fying the constraints of some obscure form; likewise, an amulet isn’t collectible simply because it’s rare.