Creative coding toy

Quine Garden

Grow strange little Ruby quines until they bloom into ASCII word art.

Quine Garden wraps the quine_art_evolver gem in a playful creative-coding surface: evolutionary search, optional LLM mutation, and a CLI for coaxing self-replicating programs toward recognizable shapes.

Browse the launch branch Install & grow one
  • Ruby gem
  • CLI-first
  • Genetic + LLM mutation
  • Tiny art + research lab

What it is

A toy you can actually learn from.

Quine Garden is meant to feel like creative coding: give it a word, let it wander, and watch it search for Ruby programs that reproduce themselves while leaning toward ASCII-art letterforms.

Under the whimsy is a real little AI-research sandbox. Evolutionary search does the heavy lifting, while the optional LLM mutation path gives you a second, messier way to explore the same search space.

The public name is Quine Garden; the package name stays quine_art_evolver for compatibility in this first release.

Example

Start with a tiny target word.

Command

quine_art_evolver generate HI \
  --strategy genetic \
  --per-letter \
  --generations 500

Target-style output

H   H  III
H   H   I
HHHHH   I
H   H   I
H   H  III

The point is not pixel-perfect typography. The fun is in making a real self-replicating Ruby program drift toward a recognizable shape.

Install

Plant it locally and see what grows.

RubyGems

gem install quine_art_evolver

Gemfile

gem "quine_art_evolver"
  • Ruby 3.2+
  • generate command for creating candidate quines
  • validate command for checking generated output
  • Optional OPENAI_API_KEY for the LLM mutation strategy

Why make this?

Because tiny weird tools are good at revealing real behavior.

Quine Garden is a lightweight way to explore how search, mutation, constraints, and model-assisted edits can cooperate inside one tiny system.

It sits closer to a lab toy than a productized platform, but that is the point: smaller experiments make it easier to notice what the machinery is actually doing, where it surprises you, and where it falls apart.

Links

GitHub preview Follow the launch branch with the gem, site copy, and release prep. RubyGems package The package name stays quine_art_evolver when the public release goes live. Talk to Ryan Questions, reactions, or invitations to push the weird little research toy further.