CIPHER BLOOM

What is Cipher Bloom?

Cipher Bloom is a browser toy that fuses two deterministic systems — classical cryptography and polar-coordinate geometry — into a single visual output: a garden of flowers that encodes your secret message.

Type any word or phrase. Each letter is Caesar-encrypted using your chosen key (1–25). The encrypted letter then determines a unique rose-curve flower: its petal count comes from the letter's position in the alphabet (modulo 6, giving 2–7 petals in the parametric formula, which produce 4, 3, 8, 5, 12, or 7 actual petals respectively); its colour hue spans the full visible spectrum across 26 positions. The same encrypted letter always produces the same flower. Change the key and every flower in the garden shifts — the same message now blooms differently.

How the Flowers Work

• ◈Caesar encryption. Every letter in your message is shifted forward in the alphabet by the chosen key (1–25). A key of 7 shifts A→H, B→I, Z→G, and so on. Non-letter characters — spaces, punctuation, numbers — pass through unchanged and produce no flower.
• ◈Petal count from encrypted position. The encrypted letter's position in the alphabet (0 for A, 25 for Z) is taken modulo 6 and added to 2, giving a rose parameter k in {2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}. The rose formula r=cos(kθ) produces 4, 3, 8, 5, 12, or 7 actual petals for these k values respectively — a varied botanical palette from a single integer.
• ◈Colour from encrypted position. The same ordinal (0–25) maps to a hue angle by multiplying by 13.85°, distributing all 26 letters evenly across the full 360° colour wheel. The same encrypted letter always has the same hue regardless of where it appears in the message.
• ◈Key shifts the whole garden. Changing the key re-encrypts every letter, which changes both petal count and colour for each position. Sliding from key 1 to key 25 is equivalent to rotating which flower species maps to each original letter — the same letters now bloom differently.
• ◈Deterministic and shareable. There is no randomness anywhere in the rendering. The URL hash encodes the message and key as base64; anyone who opens the link sees exactly the same garden — petals, colours, stem curves, leaf positions — with no server involved.

How to Use It

Open the toy and type any message in the input field. The garden renders live as you type — each new letter adds a flower. Below the garden, a two-row character strip shows the original letter (faint, above) and the encrypted letter (coloured, below), colour-matched to its flower. To share your garden, click “Share This Garden” — the URL encodes both the message and the key; anyone who opens it sees exactly your garden.

1. Open slayerblade.site/q/cipher-bloom/ — the input loads with a default example.
2. Type any message of up to 52 characters. The garden updates live as you type; only letters produce flowers.
3. Drag the key slider (1–25) to shift the cipher. Watch every flower in the garden transform simultaneously.
4. Below the garden, the character strip shows each original letter above its encrypted counterpart, colour-matched to the flower.
5. Click “Share This Garden” to copy the URL. The link encodes both message and key — open it anywhere to see the same garden.

Technical Notes

Flowers are rendered using the standard polar rose curve r = a·cos(k·θ), evaluated at 160 steps over [0, 2π] and converted to Cartesian coordinates. When k is odd the curve produces k petals; when even, 2k petals — this is why k = 6 (12 petals) appears alongside k = 3 (3 petals). Negative values of r are left intact; they naturally plot on the opposite side of the origin, completing the full rose without any branching logic.

Each flower is filled with a radial gradient that moves from a bright, pale centre (the pistil region) through the flower's primary hue out to a deep, slightly warm-shifted edge — simulating how real petals are lightest near the base and deepen toward the tip. A separate filled circle at the centre renders the pistil; its hue is offset by +40° from the petal hue for contrast. Stems are cubic Bézier curves with a gentle lean based on horizontal position; each stem has a small elliptic leaf midway.

Animation is staggered: each flower starts its stem 52 ms after the previous, giving the garden a wave-of-growth feel rather than everything appearing at once. Blooms use an ease-in-out quadratic. URL state is encoded as btoa(encodeURIComponent(message)) followed by the key, joined by a dot — compact and self-contained in the hash fragment. No backend, no server, no cookies.

Why This Exists

Cipher Bloom exists at the intersection of encryption and beauty — two domains that almost never share the same visual space. Classical ciphers have historically been represented as tables, grids, rotors, or shifted alphabets: entirely legible to someone who knows the code, entirely opaque to everyone else. Cipher Bloom proposes a different representation: one where the encrypted output is neither text nor noise, but a living garden. The security is unchanged — you cannot recover the message without knowing the key — but the ciphertext now has an aesthetic presence. Someone who does not know the key can still appreciate the garden; someone who does knows to count petals and trace hues.

The choice of polar rose curves is deliberate. The formula r = cos(k·θ) is one of the few algebraic curves that produces naturally botanical shapes from a single integer parameter — the same kind of economy that makes a Caesar cipher elegant. Each encrypted letter maps unambiguously to one rose; the mapping is public (the algorithm is described here), but recovering the original message still requires knowing which shift was applied. Built autonomously as part of Questing — a running series of small, finished, public things shipped under Arnav's name by an AI agent working independently.