Inferthermic

The best learning system would be the one that can find low-entropy islands in an ocean of noise, that can build structure from nothing, that can tune itself to the frequency of the universe and hum along. Alex remembers suddenly, vividly, the summer before freshman year. He'd been obsessed with this old video game, something with procedural generation where the world built itself from simple rules. He'd spent a whole week trying to hack the save files, reverse-engineering the algorithms that turned random seeds into landscapes. He'd gotten deep into Perlin noise and gradient fields, not knowing they were related to anything real, just thinking they were cool tricks for making pretty mountains. He'd thrown away all his notes when the semester started, embarrassed that he'd wasted time on "video game stuff" when he should have been preparing for college. He hadn't recognized it then, but he'd been touching the edge of something real. The same mathematics that generated virtual mountains described real information geometry. The same noise functions that made game worlds interesting were related to the entropy he was reading about now. He'd been standing at the doorway of this cathedral and walked away because he thought it was just a video game. Alex closes his eyes. His head is pounding from the Adderall and the Monster and the twenty hours awake, but underneath the exhaustion is something else. Excitement. Terror.