I was reading some Cthulhu Mythos stuff and started to think about those various signs and symbols that are used in the texts. Of course those are made by humans but point is that they look natural to human eyes.
So, what kind of algorithm would be needed to create natural looking symbols and signs? How this problem could be approached?
I guess Golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers are in key role.
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Reduce the problem first. Let’s have an alien letter. Let’s assume the letter is printed by an alien printer in small resolution, e.g. 20×30 points.
You can see we don’t have a lot of possibilites in such scale, most of them are already used in some Earth language.
Solution 1:
Use symbols from unusual alphabets (e.g. greek, arabic, indian alphabet), rotate them, mirror them.
This is the simplest algorithm and will look very natural (have you ever seen a Matrix code generator?)
Solution 2:
Generating your own symbols. Note that symbols are always composed from relatively simple components – straight lines, circles, curves.
Using only straight lines, you can create something like runes. Note that many natural symbols have some kind of symmetry (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runes).
Using only curves, you can create something like arabic alphabet
Word composition:
Take inspiration in different alphabets, look how they handle spaces between words or end of sentences. Probably having some smaller symbols for interpunction would be a good idea. Don’t make all the words the same length. Don’t make all the symbols appear with the same probability. Before creating long texts, you should first create syllables from your symbols and a word dictionary from the syllables. Some syllables should appear only in the beginning/end of words (grammar). The same words should be seen in different sentences (especially short words).