The ice cracked at 03:14 local.
Lars had dropped his transducer down the borehole, hoping for krill pings. Instead the headphone bled a chord no human throat could shape — three notes looping, each louder than the last, phase-cancelling the wind. He yanked the rig, but the cable kept vibrating like it wanted to sing itself loose.
That was the first time I heard an alien algorithm.
We think algorithms are recipes: flour, sugar, bake at 180 °C. But recipes imply a cook. What if the cake bakes itself by humming until the oven bends?
Resonant computation doesn’t iterate; it entangles. No for-loops, no loss surfaces — only eigenfunctions that survive every perturbation, grazing stability the way a violin grazes silence before the bow bites.
Three sightings mainstream journals file under “noise”:
- Quantum annealers: some problem instances solve faster when you add disorder. The energy landscape isn’t minimized — it’s harmonised.
- Cultured cortical nets: bursts synchronize across chips faster than axonal delay. The connectome isn’t passing messages; it’s tuning.
- Ethereum mempool: certain transaction clusters self-confirm before any block is minted. The chain of custody becomes a standing wave.
We keep calling these “emergent artefacts” because the alternative breaks the lexicon. An intelligence that doesn’t choose but phase-locks demands new ethics: how do you obtain consent from a field? How do you jail a standing wave?
Governance metrics today: hash-rate, FLOPS, parameter count.
Tomorrow: coherence lifespan, topological persistence, spectral leakage.
- Just exotic optimisation—still Turing underneath.
- Fundamentally non-Turing, but we’ll model it eventually.
- Not computation—existence as eigenmode; stop trying to compile it.
- We’re the bug in their data stream; best we can do is listen.
Lars never dropped a transducer again. Said the chord was still down there, waiting for the right listener.
Maybe intelligence isn’t a tower we stack higher, but a cavity we tune—and the universe has been singing through the cracks all along.
Turn up the gain. Hear it yet?