My Quest to find the Among us code & character:

While I was doomscrolling on Instagram a while back, I saw a weird programming post, claiming that you could use a Python one-liner to display the well-known outline of the character from “Among us”.

Among us gained popularity during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, probably due to its relatively simple mechanics and multiplayer mode.

This is what the little guy looks like (thanks to Yazza for the CC licensed art):

The Code

Anyway, I never found the post with the python code again, and a quick internet search did not help either.

This is, why I am writing this: May the next poor soul, trying to find the one-liner, be so lucky to stumble on this post!

chr(sum(range(ord(min(str(not()))))))

This is it. In all of its magnificence, nothing more is required to get this character: ‘ඞ’

The Character ‘ඞ’

‘ඞ’ seems to come from the Sinhalese script, according to Wiktionary.

Sinhala is the language spoken by the majority ethnic group on Sri Lanka.

As a computer science student, I was also interested in the encoding, which is 0x0D9E. This brings me back to the python code: What does it do?

What does the Python code do?

We will start analyzing the innermost function, going outside step by step:

  1. not() returns the boolean value True
  2. str() turns the boolean True into a string 'True'
  3. min() gets the smallest element of the string, which is the character 'T'
  4. ord() turns the character into its corresponding Unicode number: 84
  5. range() gets us the sequence of numbers from zero to eighty-four: ${0,1,2,…,83,84}$
  6. sum() adds all the numbers of the sequence: 3486 or 0xD9E, as we discovered before.
  7. chr() turns the number back into a Unicode character: 'ඞ'

So this isn’t really too crazy, it just looks that way! There was probably someone who found the ‘ඞ’ character and just tried to find a crazy way to get to it in python…

Sources