Diagrams
Every other way into this archive starts from a formation — a year, a place, a crop, a person. This one starts from the picture: what the diagram looks like.
These are similarities between drawings, not between crop formations. Three sites drew them, to three conventions: cropcirclecenter.com redraws every formation in one editor's house style at one size, and the other two publish scans and photographs of many hands. Two diagrams that hash together may be one design published twice, one editor's habit, or the same drawing reused — the archive cannot tell you which, and a family here is never evidence that two formations are related.
The biggest families are the simplest designs. Two circles, three circles in a triangle, a ring inside a ring: a plain design has few ways of being drawn and every editor draws it much the same, so it gathers a large family. Size here measures how ordinary a shape is, not how surprising the repeat is — a family of two rare designs is the more interesting find, and it sits at the bottom of the list.
The shape numbers are experimental. M3-6b graded the element count right to within one on 97.5 % of a hand-labelled sample and the rotational order right on 88.8 % against a gate of 90 %, which the extractor did not meet; the ring count agrees with a reader on 35.9 % and is not calibrated at all. Read any number here beside the picture, not instead of it.
What is counted here
| population | diagrams | what it is |
|---|---|---|
| in this section | 7,864 | every diagram file the archive stores that analysis geometry has measured, once per file |
| with shape measurements | 5,256 | cropcirclecenter.com only: element and ring counts, rotational and mirror symmetry, and a hash of the ink alone |
| hash only | 2,608 | the other two sites publish scans and photographs of many hands, so only a whole-picture hash is measured |
| flagged as a plain circle | 73 | kept and marked: a formation that really is one plain circle looks exactly like the tile a site draws when it has no design (M3-6 section 1.2) |
excluded: digest | 3 | one of the three shared files PLAN-M3.md Appendix C.2 names; shown on 1,879 record(s) |
excluded: no_ink | 5 | the same “no diagram” statement, re-encoded, found by its pixels; shown on 8 record(s) |
By site
| site | diagrams | shape measured | in a shape family |
|---|---|---|---|
| cropcirclecenter.com | 5,256 | 5,256 | 290 |
| cropcircleconnector.com | 1,676 | 0 | 0 |
| temporarytemples.co.uk | 932 | 0 | 0 |
What the shapes measure to
These three distributions are over the 5,256 diagrams with shape measurements. Each row opens the filtered grid that produced it.
Elements
Separate pieces of ink of at least 30 pixels; the count is right to within one on 97.5 % of a 161-diagram hand-labelled sample.
| elements | diagrams |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1,827 |
| 2 | 1,122 |
| 3 | 638 |
| 4 | 351 |
| 5 | 355 |
| 6 | 203 |
| 7–8 | 229 |
| 9–12 | 223 |
| 13–20 | 167 |
| 21 or more | 141 |
Rotational symmetry
The order is right on 88.8 % of a 197-diagram hand-labelled sample, against a gate of 90 %. Continuous and “none found” are opposite statements, not counts.
| order | diagrams |
|---|---|
| continuous (concentric circles) | 534 |
| none found | 3,013 |
| 2-fold | 693 |
| 3-fold | 309 |
| 4-fold | 287 |
| 5-fold | 76 |
| 6-fold | 193 |
| 7-fold or more | 151 |
Shape families
A family is a group of diagrams whose hashes lie within 4 bits of one another. 90 families cover 290 of the 5,256 shape-measured diagrams; the largest holds 37. Read them, largest first.
| hash | what it hashes | sites | used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| shape hash | a hash of the ink alone, cropped to its own bounds: a fingerprint of the design | cropcirclecenter.com | families and neighbours |
| picture hash | a hash of the whole picture, background included: two matches can be the same canvas rather than the same design | cropcircleconnector.com and temporarytemples.co.uk | neighbours only — see the note below |
Families are built on the shape hash alone, where a known repeat sits 0 to 2 bits away, against a median of 30 for a random pair. The whole-picture hash the other two sites carry is mostly a hash of the background: grouping on it puts 101 unrelated files into one group whose only shared feature is the 575×415 canvas cropcirclecenter draws on, so no family is published from it. Nearest neighbours are offered for every diagram, never across the two hashes.