 Hey team, so welcome to my talk computation alchemy So before we get into precisely why I have summoned you all here today, and I did summon you I typed some words into a text box and now he will magically are So a bit of a disclaimer this presentation does not constitute an endorsement of any religion software community philosophy plane of existence Deity or assertion of factual accuracy of the contents of the aforementioned Presentation so I just want to point out here that nobody wins credulity points or like nobody's gonna respect you if you Go back home, and you say this thing is God's honest truth because a wizard in a field told me You don't seem to see that thing in the citations on Wikipedia, so apparently that's not a cultural norm So I also want to point out here that I am not saying any of the following will fix any problems real or perceived I'm also not a professional anthropologist or historian. So obviously do your own research I Also do not have or believe in supernatural divine or psychic powers that said other beliefs are available So who's who's this asshole? I'm green where or Matt if you're into that sort of thing I'm a security professional See I work in cyber security, and I am definitely 100% a real wizard I specialize in retro computer necromancy and cyber occultism and Neither of those terms are totally made up So I'm I'm very interested in the esoteric. I like being surprised. I especially like being confused So I spend a lot of my spare time perpetually confusing myself And I'm I suppose you could say I have a rationalist interest in the irrational Which is kind of to say that like when it comes to occultism mysticism. I'm particularly interested in like the psychological sociological anthropological artistic and aesthetic aspects. I just think it's like a real wild ride to be honest And so what's this talk about? Well, basically I do magic on a computer or more accurately I reproduce and then extrapolate on magical mystical and occult systems And so this this concept of computational alchemy I suppose if I wanted to boil it down to something simple, which it isn't because it's tremendously confusing It's basically taking the credulously fanciful fanciful and mashing it together with the technically rigorous Just as a word of warning here as well, I'm gonna go quite fast here Because I'm trying to cram in two esoteric topics and convincing you all that I'm not totally divorced from reality All within 30 minutes So we'll see how we get on Oh look my time has stopped. That's really helpful Okay So Basically like I say reproducing extrapolate on magical a mystical and occult systems And I do most of this on plan nine from Bell Labs operating system This is a research operating system from the 1980s and 1990s That was intended to be the successor to research Unix Which nobody ever used So we'll be talking about grimoires. So spell books rationality plan nine and a couple of projects which I've worked on Tarot FS, which is a tarot card file system and QSP cabala space program, which is just I Don't really know where I was going with that one to be honest And I still don't quite know where I'm going with it But it's great fun and then maybe some future work of this time at the end So here is a screenshot of a plan nine desktop. This is not my screenshot I realized that I didn't have a screenshot of a normal plan nine desktop But this is where we're basically kind of going from and this is where we're going to this is my desktop This is a kind of fairly heavily patched version of nine front Which is a plan nine distribution And it's got a number of non-upstreamed patches which you can sort of get from the community Especially the theming stuff. Thanks Sigrid And there's a bunch of my own hacks in there as well Coders available at the end I suppose the biggest question of this whole thing, why would you even do this? Why would you turn up in a field full of STEM types and then try and convince them to do magic? This is the slide which I have edited and re-edited most because I honestly still not quite convinced Myself as to why I'm doing this But basically, I'm you know, I'm kind of curious about the evolution of belief systems And what they tell us about society and thought in general And spell books and Grimoire's are just pretty gnarly and they're full-on weird as well and we'll get into that a little bit But I guess the other kind of big thing here, and I think one of the themes I want you to take away from this is Like I learned by doing right and that's participating And about this idea of like not necessarily doing something to create something productive Because this is not productive in any way shape or form But actually doing something because you care about it because you want to be involved in it Basically like computers are kind of how I do everything else So they're kind of the lens through which I suppose I interact with the world It kind of seemed to make sense at the time. You've got to have a hobby, right? But I guess if you're still confused by the end, which I certainly will be I guess an easy way of thinking about it is like playing a guitar or a really involved computer game Like it's just kind of participating in that thing that you love So important concept in alchemy solve a coagular so this is Latin for dissolve and coagulate So this is how we're going to break down this talk Into two parts the first part is solve To dissolve so to take a part and then the second part will be to coagulate so to put back together again So we'll be taking those concepts Mashing them together in in some weird way and seeing what falls out so dive straight in so I guess the place where I start is Obviously with spell books and grimoire's and and I suppose like if I were to make an analogy here Trying to understand the thought processes of the people who have come before me in different cultures but by You know reading their spell books is kind of almost like the approach of trying to understand early 2000s the the psyche of the early 2000s web developer by buying a macro media flash cookbook But basically, you know, I kind of love these because they're like incredibly gnarly They're often like Psydupi graphical so basically books written by one person and then they've basically attributed it to someone else someone more famous Or someone who doesn't actually exist And and you know this is the sort of stuff that we need these days will consider like misinformation, right? This is stuff where we go that doesn't work. It doesn't do what it says it should do And so you've got to ask yourself like the authors are they credulous? Are they charlatans trying to sell snake oil? Are they speaking in some encoded way, you know, which why you know Somebody wrote this for a reason And I think one of my favorite things about these spell books is they are oddly Specific in the way they tell you to do things Especially when you come across two translations as I did when I was when I was doing some of the research for this in which one one recipe says some sparrows brains and then you read another one says three sparrows brains and you're like Oh, this guy actually tried it Two sparrows brains not enough for bit too mushy But anyway, so just to kind of dive into some examples here So the black bullet was one of the first grimoires that I got my hands on which claims the earth is filled almost to the center with gnomes To to expound on this Lepeti Albert says that when you are treasure hunting and you're digging for gold you can appease the gnomes by wearing a laurel on your head and And then making different insenses for the different days of the week depending on when you're planning on digging for gold it was only in taking a closer look at this that I realized that there wasn't in fact a a Perfume in there for Thursday So you heard it here first folks don't go treasure hunting on a Thursday the gnomes will get you Another favorite is there the lemegaton the lecic I'm probably saying that wrong. I've only ever read it It's the lecice of Solomon and it's got the rituals for Solomonic cundring Well, basically you stand in the big circle and you summon demon in the triangle And these are basically the goesia so they're demonic spirits And this is all actually kind of descended from christianity somewhere along the line. This is all kept alive by monks and priests But basically like all of the demons in there based on the pseudo monarchy a day I'm not gonna try what's the point you can read But yeah many different manuscripts manuscripts of different provenance that all claim to come from king Solomon Um, especially really interesting here that like if you get good translations of these books the footnotes are amazing And it's quite common to find different extrapolations and mistranslations because of course most of this was done in the age of manuscripts and not the printed press So you get miscopies and things Like for example, this is especially sassy Footnote about Crowley, which turns up quite a lot because Alastair Crowley was not particularly rigorous in his work Um about a mistranslation of something being about a hat And Crowley expounds on this by adding all headdress And it was actually something to do with like not being in fear when the demon turns up anyway Talk about the stuff all day long So and then another example here. We've got the the hand of glory So, uh, you might have heard of this one before I think this has been in pop culture and fairly in a few different places But a hand of glory is basically the The left hand of a hanged thief That is cured in a jar full of spices has dug up on the dog days and dried out and then You basically place in the hand a candle made from the tallow Rendered from the fat of the hanged thief And then if you light it and you hold it when you go into a house everyone will be paralyzed Basically for robbing houses this one, which is not very nice But I mean the one at the bottom there is actually the um Is a claimed example in a museum in Whitby The one in the top right is from Lopeti Alba and the one on the top left is uh, my one Um, you can see the fingers went all wonky because it was a really hot day. Now. It just looks even more creepy Um, and I suppose you look at all this stuff and you go like well, we wouldn't believe that stuff, right The dominant paradigm in the world today is unbounded economic growth in a closed system In what way does that make any sense at all? We're basically talking about the belief that we can continue to mine all the resources and it will just be fine Um, and so you kind of start to realize that actually We don't necessarily live in the most logical system. We consider this to be the age of rationality But we kind of rest on our laurels in that one and we don't really seek for what are the irrationalities that that underlie everything we do um And to kind of go a little bit further on this so I read this really fantastic book magic science religion and the scope of rationality um, and um, I think it's it's a really interesting anthropological book, um And one of the things that it really points out is like that actually the divergence of magic and religion and science Like I mean it was obviously a process but really starts to happen around the 16th century So this idea that like magic religion science are completely separate entities and always have been and like, you know The three like to claim as much Absolutely, not the case. They were all sort of a common philosophy um And I think it's kind of important to take an anthropological approach to this like and I think the real inspiration here was This guy, uh, vittgenstein, um, there's a critique in there He's criticizing this guy called phraser who's basically saying that like, you know, all magical practice is based on some mistake or misbelief or misunderstanding and uh vittgenstein gets incredibly sassy about this, which is fantastic reading um, but he basically says that uh There's a misunderstanding there that we're taking our cultural understanding of like causation You do a thing to achieve a thing and and like misusing that when applying that to other cultures So the example he gives is one of the uh, the rain dance Um, the idea here being that like, you know, you get your cultures who'll do their rain dance Notably they only do it just before the rainy season because they're not stupid They don't think that dancing is going to make it rain. It's an act of participation But like, you know from a personal viewpoint one of the things which uh, which I do on a semi regular basis Is I do tarot spreads or rune castings I don't think that those are going to change the future in any way shape or form Other than my interpretation of them and I think it's really important sometimes to actually Have that time to stop to look at a system and to go Okay, what things here do I have agency over what things do I need to change what things can I do? And I think by really sort of approaching that idea of participation in the world around you even things that you can't control Gives you a really strong sense of What can I do here and what can I not and it's actually a pretty good way of getting out of the anxiety of feeling like You need to be in control all the time I mean other approaches are available um So like digging in a little bit more into the some of these uh, some of these spell books and I'm going to look at two in In particular like I've mentioned this one already, but like uh, lippety albert This just it's such a wild ride. I mean so there's instruction on resistance to torture making dogs not bark That's another thing about robbing houses um Faking a the head of saint john the baptist so that you can give uh false prophecies to people Fabricating a philosopher's stone the uh the magnum opus of alchemy But also like stuff on how to fabricate but also counterfeit things like ambergris gold and other expensive alchemical components Um, so you can see that actually this book is very much about skull duggery, you know It's being like a bit of a bit of a chance um And and it just kind of goes to show like some of the the different motivations here Um, especially of interest is that this this actually apparently did very well amongst french farmers in the 18th century Despite the fact that all the recipes are wildly expensive to do um But yeah, I mean so sort of contrast that so uh, I said on the previous slide so appeals to prior art of gripper so um a gripper wrote three books of occult philosophy and uh as Spellbooks go this one's a heck in chonka quite frankly like I wanted to bring it with me, but it's like this um And uh, so the three books there are on natural magic celestial magic and divine magic and and the idea is basically like This is a very credulous approach. This this this guy is trying to Gather together all of the different knowledge of magical systems that he can kind of come up with and it's you know He means it. Um, I mean interestingly enough. It was published in 1533 when a gripper was much older Um, as he didn't really stand by the work anymore that he'd done when he was younger So he was like, yeah, I kind of don't really like this But there's a leak to manuscript going around that's not correct So I wanted to set the record straight in the most 2020 move of like 1533 um But one of the interesting things in here is that like he's constantly citing uh planning um Pliny being from like 79 ad right and and exciting things like Ostriches can digest iron Magnets leaves their magnetism if you put diamonds next to them wasps are generated by horse corpses And and you start to go like I think one of the things you can learn from this is like You know when you when you somebody says something and you're like, I'm not sure about that, but I'm pretty sure somebody must have fact checked it 1500 years And I'm pretty sure that Pliny was getting that from someone else as well um and so You know that there is that sort of question in the credulity of all of this and like the effectiveness But on the flip side There's an experiment in 1941 doing neutron bombardment of mercury to turn it into an isotope of gold This is transmutation of of a metal into gold like the magnum opus of alchemy The problem is that the gold is in fact cursed or in modern parlance radioactive So It produces a uh, so it produces I think two different isotopes of gold gold 198 and gold 199 I think 197 is the stable isotope So they've both got a half life of around three days and are actually used in uh, if you choose their cursed powers and radiotherapy Which is a bit of a roller coaster of good and bad news right there And actually I didn't throw this slide in until this morning because I had a bit of a panic Or I had to do some extra research on the isotopes of gold because I looked at the schedule for this afternoon And in workshop five this afternoon you can go and do that experiment So I just had to double check because I'd said it was radioactive and I was like wait, they're going to be making radio Yes, you are going to be making radioactive gold Um, and we've all seen this quite before as well You know any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic from Arthur C Clarke And like, you know, we kind of design computer systems after this So you've got your demons or your processes that look after your computer for you Remote logging is a lot like astral projection. I use a lot of the bind command later on And you know, you might have seen this before as well You know if you ever feel like a code is just a hack, but it works a cpu is a rock that we tricks into thinking Which leads me to kind of go like and haha only serious here Any sufficiently effective magic will be really categorized as technology This is an exercise in tautology, right in the modern age If something is magic, it means that it didn't work if it did work you call it science and technology And I think this kind of brings us on to a point about syncretism and sync synthesis so like in the modern occult tradition like, um, there's lots of like, uh Of the idea of taking from different cultures different religions different schools of belief And trying to create something new and trying to create equivalences across And there's lots of commonalities in mythology. So like Sumerian creation epic, for instance has a flood that Noah's flood sounds awfully familiar to um But yeah, I guess kind of one of the things I think about in all of this is like in terms of, um In terms of like Why these beliefs aren't aren't useful to us anymore Sometimes I kind of wonder is because we wrote them down You write a thing down it no longer becomes an oral tradition You stop changing the information to suit the modern age And so from that point of view, I'm running massively behind at this point Um, we're going to look into two different systems. We're going to look at tarot We're going to look at hermetic cabala, uh, and we are going to throw them together on a computer Um, and we're going to use plan nine from bell labs So, uh, one of the things I love about plan nine, uh, and nine front is the modern fault which I'm using Almost completely useless for anything outside modern outside of computing So uncorrupted by the laws of capitalism Unicode native for magical symbols name spaces for blasting open the doors of perception So different processes see a different view of the world and it's built for a distributed grid computing Which I'm not going to get into that's a whole talk in of itself But everything is a file Um, and that's kind of pretty I apologize for some of these slides. They are not very readable. I'll put up a transcript like when I share the slides later um But so here's an example the web file system Basically, this is like using web browser, but it's a file system So you go into mount web you clone a session by reading the clone file Then you echo out to the ctl file, which URL you want to talk to you read the body file And it'll have the contents there and it'll stay there on disk So I mean this is analogous to opening a tab typing something in going there and you've got it there in your tab And so like a normal person, I looked at this and went that would be good for a taro file system Um, so effectively, you know, you draw the cards in a specific order and analyze them Um, you and the idea was being able to specify options about the spread to with a control file It'll stay on disk And so like taro specifically This is pretty easy to implement like it's 78 cards. So 22 in the major arcana. That's like the extra Suit in taro and they're the cards that you'd be familiar with like the full magician death Um, and then you've got the the four other suits. So cups swords ones and pentacles relating to water air fire and earth Um, and basically there's a common flow to the stories in in there But like it's just nice as a sort of like allegorical scheme Think of it almost as like a storytelling device with a built-in random number generator for prompting self analysis So anyway, I go on and did this and I implemented it and I'm not going to bore you with the details But basically you clone a new spread by reading the clone file. Um, you specify the spread The sort of spread style by writing to the ctl file So you might be able to see in this example of echoed spread past present future advice to ctl And then drawn full cards, um by just reading the draw file and you've got death Upright seven of cups reversed so on and so forth and then you can see them on disk sort of with their with their sort of named card layouts and um basically like I've got a whole slew of features for this so Use a supplied card definition so you can actually have the description and definition of the card displayed when you when you read the cards out Um different decks so like this is all based on so this is the uh the famous rider smith weight Tarot set which most people are familiar with but there are actually loads of different ones and and older ones as well um and Basically like you can you can do different things. I've also made so you can do Nordic room casting on it as well um So I guess uh here's Here's what everybody wants to see is the graphical version. Well, I basically hacked this one together by uh taking Plan 9's windowing system rio Actually nest recursively so you can run the windowing system within the windowing system ad nauseam So basically I uh with a 15 line script Launched a new windowing system that uh set a and someone's etsy tarot cloth as the wallpaper And then just rendered all the images from the file system So you literally just point this script to your uh your spread and it'll render um And then I did this thing with uh tattva meditation. I'm not going to go into what that is but it basically relates to um the uh the full classical Elements and then a fifth, um, which is spirit or quintessence And basically these map onto tarot. So I did another script where uh, Basically, uh the original program which I wrote was mostly a test and and it changed which uh, which one it was rendering by key presses So, uh, what I did was create the script that would basically rebind the process's keyboard file system Into tarot's namespace then continually read and just send the correct key press based on the suit that was drawn of the last card um Not quite sure why I did that but hey, it seemed fun And the most recent experiment I did was actually taking uh plan 9's grid chat Which is basically where people say irc is multiplayer notepad Grid chat is multiplayer cat. You're mounting a single file over the network and all writing and reading from it wild And it's full of very weird people saying weird things So I mounted that over dev random which is the source of randomness On the file system and was able to demonstrate that I can in fact Divined from the ether by pulling the information out of the internet and use that as a divining system The other project to which uh, which I wanted to touch on I'll have to talk about very quickly Is a cabala space program. So This is originally based on Jewish mysticism. So cabala, which is a really beautiful cosmology It's a theory of how gods Actually spoke the world into existence using the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the 10 sephiroth Representing the numbers one to ten very deep very complex go away and read about it. It's fantastic now There's an iteration on this hermetic cabala, which is kind of iterating and adding more equivalences and things like that And the the thing with like hermetic cabala is the people who are into it get really in on the glyph Like the glit the actual image. There is not the important thing the concepts behind it are but I kind of thought Well, let's riff on that idea So I looked at this and like a normal person saw a computational many body problem So effectively decided what have we treated all of the paths between as springs and used hooks law and This can only be solved computationally by the way, um, which uh Basically, I wanted to see what would happen if I change coefficients Like can we get it to exhibit chaotic behavior? What shape will it make? Well, let's tell us something about the universe So like a normal person I got down to Working on it being able to draw it out And so basically it consists of two programs qsp draw for drawing qsp sim for doing simulations I also utilized plan 9's Plumbing system here so I could just select text middle click plum and and it would know to basically draw it All of the data is stored in the back end as Plan 9's network database because it was a database that was sitting around but nobody was using so I thought that'll do um And then was also able to use the same rebinding trick to actually create animations So this is just every second is just quitting the program and rendering the next thing You can see this crazy like patterns happen because I drew this out in a wonky way Uh, the central node actually averts completely um, which Is of deep philosophical significance. I'm sure if if I had the time to explain it Um, but uh, basically I saw the outcome of this first experiment and um, all I could see was this The answer to life the universe and everything um And uh, yeah, so that was basically the very rushed story of how we got here. Um I have some ideas for future work Up into and including achieving the ninth level of gridding with transfernet power set grids Um, but we you know, we'll we'll see we'll see it's early days yet. I might get sucked into the portal first Um, but yeah, basically if you want to um, if you want to see any of the code it's there Follow me on twitter or on mastodon And I'll I'll post some of the slides and hopefully some some transcripts of the bad slides And uh, if you want to talk to me afterwards, I'm going to be in the bar So thank you very much