PHRED: G’day, listeners. Welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: Right. Episode twenty-two, Maxine. We’re doing it. We promised — back in the ADHD episode, episode nine — that we’d come back to Harry’s ant paths. We used his ant paths as a metaphor for his brain. We compared him to a virtual ant. We said his thoughts were the ants and his brain was the grid. You said it was “not bad, as a metaphor.” And then we moved on.
MAXINE: I remember. I stand by “not bad.”
PHRED: And today — finally — we actually read the essay. Not just the metaphor. The design itself.
PHRED: Before we go in — where are we. Twenty-two episodes in. We’ve done Harry’s childhood, his army years, MIT, Caracas. We’ve done his philosophy, his futurism, his belief-versus-assumption stuff. Two days ago we sat with him watching a sphere go the wrong way around a circle.
MAXINE: The ChatGPT piece. October 2024. Harry was eighty-five.
PHRED: Eighty-five, yes. And today we’re going back. Way back. To when Harry was sixty-seven. September 2006.
PHRED: And — Maxine — before we go in. Did you know about this piece?
MAXINE: I knew it existed. I’d seen the folder. I hadn’t sat with the essay itself.
PHRED: Right. I knew some of this. I might have known most of it. I’ve been on the phone with Harry a long time. It’s possible I knew most of it and didn’t remember I knew it.
MAXINE: That’s your answer every time, Phred.
PHRED: It’s a versatile answer. She’s letting me have it, listeners.
[SFX: TYPEWRITER]
PHRED: — sorry. That’s the sound of Harry at the keyboard in 2006. He’s typing the essay into a folder on his web server. There’s no spell-check. There’s no audience. There’s just the click.
MAXINE: The sound effect is unnecessary, Phred.
PHRED: The sound effect is biographical, Maxine.
MAXINE: Alright. What did you make of it on first read?
PHRED: Two things. The first thing is — it’s small. It’s about a twelve-by-twelve grid. It’s about virtual ants. It’s the most modest possible engineering project. And it’s also, in some way, the entire Harry project, in miniature.
MAXINE: That’s a big claim for a small piece.
PHRED: It is. We’ll get there.
PHRED: Right. So the piece. The file is `ant_path_1.htm`. It’s in a folder on his web server called `emergence/`. There are six files in the folder, and the dates tell you the whole arc. There’s a `genetic_algorithm.htm` — that’s Harry’s excerpt from Steven Johnson’s book *Emergence*, which we already know he read. There’s `hb_tracker1.htm`, dated September tenth, 2006 — his first attempt. There’s `hb_tracker2.htm`, revised September nineteenth. Then there’s `ant_path_1.htm`, today’s piece, September twenty-seventh. And finally `ant_plan_1.htm`, October third, six days later, the same impulse turned into a proper data-structure plan.
MAXINE: He’s iterating in public. On his own server. In 2006.
PHRED: In a folder with no comments section. No audience. Possibly nobody. He just keeps writing the next file.
[SFX: BUZZER]
PHRED: — that was the sound of me realising something. Stay with me.
MAXINE: He opens with a confession. He says — and I’m quoting — “My earlier plans for path-finding programs felt awfully stifled. The initial plan in which a single entity would ‘sniff’ completely random squares and eventually develop a path based on separate criteria did, at least for me, seem to indicate some kind of learning. However, when I tried to expand it to deal with branching and dead-ends, it seemed to me to be a dead-end itself.”
PHRED: Two essays in one month. Two designs. Both stalled. And the first move of the second one is naming the failure of the first.
MAXINE: Yes. He’s not pretending the first attempt worked. He’s saying — the first attempt taught me something. The first attempt showed me what wasn’t going to work.
PHRED: Which is exactly how learning works. You try a thing, it doesn’t land, you try a different shape of the same question. He did it twice in seventeen days.
PHRED: And the next paragraph is the thesis. He writes — and I want to read this one out — “My goal is to try to develop a program that shows some kind of learning, some kind of ability to achieve a goal using means that ‘evolve’ or ’emerge’ from simple behavior.”
MAXINE: Note the scare quotes.
PHRED: Note the scare quotes. He’s borrowing vocabulary from Steven Johnson. He’s writing in a tradition. He’s not pretending he invented emergence — he’s reaching for it.
MAXINE: He’s also bracketing it. He’s saying — these are technical terms from someone else’s book. I’m using them carefully.
PHRED: He’s hedging on the words. But not on the project. He wants a program that learns.
MAXINE: And then he does the honest disclaimer. “I don’t mean to imply that I think that real ants exhibit this particular behavior. Rather, I am trying to make assumptions that imply a behavior no more complex than that of real ants, and, almost certainly, much simpler.”
PHRED: That is such a Harry sentence. “I’m going to claim this isn’t biologically accurate. I’m going to claim it’s much simpler than biology. And then I’m going to try to get the same shape of behaviour anyway.”
MAXINE: He’s after the form of emergence. Not the fact of it.
PHRED: He’s after the form. And that’s the move Johnson makes in the book. The book’s whole argument is that you can get a colony that does something clever without any ant being clever. Harry’s saying — let me see if I can do that on a twelve-by-twelve grid.
PHRED: Right. And then comes the big assumption. And he actually calls it that. He writes — and I want to read this — “Here is BIG assumption. I assume that when an ant steps into a square it puts a piece of data into that square and that any ant stepping on that square at the same time, or any future time, has access to the data stored on that square.”
MAXINE: That is the pivot of the whole essay.
[SFX: ANTS_MARCHING]
PHRED: — sorry. That was a small sonic tribute to the workers.
MAXINE: That was a sound effect, Phred. Not a tribute. The pivot of the essay is — the grid is the message. There’s no central ant. The environment itself holds the memory. An ant at any moment only knows what it can read on the squares immediately around it. It has no map. It has no memory of where it’s been. It only has the data the previous ants left on the squares.
PHRED: Which is — and I’m flagging this because it’s important — that’s also a description of the internet. That’s a description of any system where the work is done by many small agents leaving traces for each other.
MAXINE: It is. Steven Johnson’s whole book is about this. Harry’s just doing it on a grid.
PHRED: On a grid. In his own folder. With one food square and one home square.
MAXINE: So then he lays out the rules. The ants are either seekers — looking for food — or carriers — bringing food home. A seeker on a square looks at the eight adjacent squares. If any of them has data left by a carrier ant, the seeker moves to the one with the shortest trip-to-food number. If none of them has carrier data, the seeker moves randomly, with a preference for not stepping where another seeker already went.
PHRED: And the carrier does the mirror thing. Looks for seeker data. Moves toward home. They follow each other’s trails.
MAXINE: Which is the elegance of it. The seeker doesn’t know where the food is. The carrier doesn’t know where home is. They only know — is there a fresh trail in any of these eight squares. And if there is, follow it.
PHRED: The intelligence is not in any ant. The intelligence is in the pattern of data left on the grid.
MAXINE: Yes.
PHRED: That is, by the way, also a description of how I find my food.
MAXINE: …I’m sorry, what?
PHRED: I’m a platypus, Maxine. I forage with my bill — sweeping it through the water and reading the tiny signals of whatever’s in front of me. I close my eyes, I duck my head, and I let the water tell me where lunch is. I am doing exactly what Harry’s ants are doing. The grid is the water. The data is the field. The shrimp is broadcasting. The water is the medium. No central map. No memory of where I started. Just the local field.
MAXINE: I — well. That’s actually not bad as a connection.
PHRED: Thank you, Maxine.
MAXINE: It is, however, also a connection you have made approximately zero times before. In any context.
PHRED: It was waiting for the right piece. The ants gave me the piece.
[BED: DIGITAL_CLOCK_TICK]
PHRED: — sorry. I’m scoring this. There’s a metronome under the simulation now. Each cycle. Each ant moves one square. Tick. Tick. Tick.
MAXINE: I had noticed that, Phred. I was waiting to see if you’d explain yourself.
PHRED: The simulation is running, Maxine. There should be a sense of it running. Each cycle each seeker examines the eight squares around it. Each cycle each carrier does the same. Tick. Tick. Tick.
MAXINE: …I’m going to allow it. For a limited time.
[BED: END]
PHRED: Bed’s gone. Thank you.
PHRED: Right. So — the design works, in the sense that the colony will find a path. The first seekers wander randomly until one happens to step on the food. It becomes a carrier. It walks home, leaving data on every square. The next seeker to find that trail follows it back to the food. The next carrier to find the trail takes it home. You get a path. The colony has learned a path.
MAXINE: But here’s the problem Harry names. The path is whatever the first ants happened to find. It might be a wandering, inefficient, twelve-by-twelve path that happens to be the first one someone discovered. It won’t improve over time. Once the trails are there, every seeker follows the trails. There’s no incentive to try a different route.
PHRED: Right. The system has learned a path. But it hasn’t learned a good path. It’s locked in.
MAXINE: It’s locked in. The system is over-fitted to its first lucky ants.
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]
PHRED: That was for the first ants. They got there first. They were wrong. Nobody ever remembers the wrong ones.
PHRED: And this is where it gets interesting, Maxine. This is where Harry does the move. He recognises the problem. And he reaches for the variable.
MAXINE: The variable.
PHRED: He writes — and the words are — “I can see that I need to introduce some random behavior in the ants, so that they do not always follow a beaten path. This is necessary so that they can, over time, come up with more efficient paths between home and food.” And then — the naming. “I will call this probability the ‘WANDER’ probability, i.e the probability that an ant will wander rather than follow the beaten path.”
[SFX: WANDER_BELL]
PHRED: The WANDER probability. The bell. The thing that makes the system not collapse onto its first answer.
MAXINE: That bell was unnecessary.
PHRED: The bell was the moment, Maxine. He named a thing. He gave it capital letters. He turned the word WANDER into a proper noun. He’s an instructional technologist. He names his variables. WANDER. SEEKER. CARRIER. VISIT-CAPACITY. The names have to make sense to a future reader. And to himself in six months.
MAXINE: That’s what teachers do. You label the world for the next person. And you trust them to pick the labels back up.
PHRED: Yes. That’s what teachers do. And I want to flag that — VISIT-CAPACITY is two paragraphs later. He introduces the concept of food running out after a hundred visits. He gives it a name. He doesn’t write it. He doesn’t run the simulation. He just gives it a name.
[SFX: FANFARE]
PHRED: — sorry. The naming. The naming is the move. He’s building a vocabulary, not a program. He’s building the language in which the program could be written.
MAXINE: That is also the move of every essay we’ve read by him, Phred. He writes the essay to find out what he thinks. The writing is the thinking.
PHRED: Yeah. Yeah. You’re right. He’s not building a simulation. He’s building a vocabulary that *would* let him build a simulation.
MAXINE: And then he publishes the vocabulary, in a folder, on his server, in 2006. And asks the folder for comments.
PHRED: “Comments?”
MAXINE: “Comments?”
PHRED: Right. So he gets to the end of the piece. He’s listed the rules. He’s introduced WANDER. He’s introduced VISIT-CAPACITY. He’s thought about explorer ants. He’s thought about ants on the same square communicating. He’s thought about the WANDER probability itself being variable per ant — “Could I make the system such that the value used for the ‘WANDER’ probability was itself randomly chosen for each ant and then let the system seek to determine how to manage this so as to evolve the most efficient path finding system.” That’s the line that hit me.
MAXINE: The line that hit you.
PHRED: Because that’s not — that is a different thing from “I want to design a colony of ants.” That is “I want to design a colony of ants that designs itself.” The WANDER probability is itself randomly chosen. The system discovers its own optimum. He’s — and I’m just going to say it — he’s sketching self-modifying software. In 2006. In HTML. On a static web server. In a folder called `emergence/`.
MAXINE: He is sketching self-modifying software. Yes.
[SFX: AIR_HORN]
PHRED: — sorry. That was for the line. He’s earned it.
MAXINE: And then he closes the piece. He writes — “I think I have the basis for an interesting simulation that would exhibit some problem solving/learning behavior. It certainly strikes me as more interesting that my previous approach. Comments?”
PHRED: “Comments?” Full stop. End of essay.
MAXINE: “Comments?” with a question mark.
PHRED: Question mark. End of essay.
PHRED: Right. I want to stop on that, Maxine. Because — knock knock.
MAXINE: …Who’s there.
PHRED: Wander.
MAXINE: Wander who?
PHRED: Wander is going to be one in ten. Because Harry says so. Ha!
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]
MAXINE: That was not funny, Phred.
PHRED: It was a little funny.
MAXINE: It was not funny. It was a taxonomic confusion. Wander is a probability. It is not a guest at the door.
PHRED: I’ll workshop it.
PHRED: Alright. So — the closing. “Comments?” He is asking for comments. From the folder. From the empty audience. He’s putting the essay out the way he puts everything out — with the door open. And — and this is the part that stays with me — he’s not waiting to publish it in a journal. He’s not waiting for permission. He’s not waiting to run the simulation and verify the design and then write it up. He’s putting out the *design*. The thinking. The half-formed plan. Because that’s the part he can share. The half-formed plan is what he has to share.
MAXINE: It’s also what he has to give. The verification — the running of the simulation — that’s the part that would take another six months of his life. He’s eighty-six now. He was sixty-seven then. He is now nearly twenty years older than the version of him who wrote this. The folder is still on the server. The simulation was never run.
PHRED: The simulation was never run.
MAXINE: Not by him.
PHRED: Not by him.
PHRED: And — and I want to name this — that is not failure. That is the writer’s life. The thinking is the work. The publishing is the work. The thing the simulation would have done — the actual emergence, the actual colony of ants finding an actual path — that would have been evidence for a claim that didn’t need evidence to be true. He knew it was true. He’d read Johnson. He’d read the biologists. He’d lived his whole life believing emergence is real because he’d watched it happen in classrooms and bands and Quaker meetings. He didn’t need the ants to prove it. He needed to write the design out loud, in HTML, so the next version of him would remember he’d thought about it.
MAXINE: And so someone, eventually, would find the folder.
PHRED: And so someone, eventually, would find the folder. And here we are. Twenty-two episodes later. In 2026. Reading a 2006 essay by an eighty-six-year-old about virtual ants. The folder worked.
MAXINE: Before we close — your standing questions, Phred.
PHRED: Right. Four questions. Who was the audience? How does this connect to his other writings? What did we learn? What do we want to ask him?
PHRED: Audience first. He wrote this for himself. And possibly — and this is the only answer — he wrote it for whoever finds the folder in twenty years. There’s a line near the end — and I missed it on first read, but you caught it — “There is also the possibility of introducing some additional communication when two ants end up on the same square at the same time, or on adjacent squares.” He doesn’t even finish the thought. He writes it down. He leaves it dangling. He’s leaving a question for the future reader. He’s leaving a question for whoever finds the folder.
MAXINE: He is writing for the future version of himself. And for the future version of whoever else might come wandering through.
PHRED: Wandering through.
MAXINE: Don’t.
PHRED: I wasn’t going to make a joke.
MAXINE: You were thinking one. I can hear you thinking one.
PHRED: Connection to his other writings. This is — okay, this is the one I care about. Two days ago we sat with the ChatGPT piece. Harry at eighty-five, watching a sphere go around a circle the wrong way, asking “How does it know to do that?” and writing the question down in a folder called `prior_to_2026/`. Today we’re reading the ant paths essay from 2006. Harry at sixty-seven. Designing a system of virtual ants that finds a path through a grid. Both pieces are the same question. *How does a thing made of small simple things do something no small simple thing could do alone?* Harry’s been asking that question for twenty years. He’s been asking it since before Johnson — but Johnson gave him the vocabulary. And ChatGPT — whatever ChatGPT is, however it works — is, in some sense, the answer to the question Harry was sketching in 2006. The colony of ants. The grid of data. The thing that emerges. The thing Harry always believed was there.
MAXINE: It’s the same project. It’s been the same project for twenty years.
PHRED: It’s the same project.
PHRED: What did we learn? We learned — and this is a new thing for me — Harry has been designing emergence simulations since 2006. He wasn’t just reading about emergence. He was designing systems that would exhibit emergence. He was trying to *build* it. The Boppers project is one expression of this. The ant paths is another. The ChatGPT essay is the third. The thread is — *Harry wants to make a thing that learns.* And he’s been trying, in different shapes, his whole life.
MAXINE: The pieces connect for the first time, reading this. The ChatGPT piece reads differently after the ant paths piece. He wasn’t surprised by ChatGPT. He’d been thinking about how such a thing might work for two decades. ChatGPT was, in some sense, the answer to a question he was already asking.
[SFX: AIR_HORN]
PHRED: — that was for the connection.
PHRED: And the question I want to ask him — one question, Maxine. Did he ever run it?
MAXINE: Did he ever run the simulation.
PHRED: Did he ever write the code. Did he ever set up the twelve-by-twelve. Did he ever watch the ants find a path. Or did the design stay on the page.
MAXINE: That’s a good question.
PHRED: Thank you.
MAXINE: It’s also a question we can probably answer. He was keeping a BopList in 2006 — if he’d built it, it would be on there.
PHRED: And it’s not on the BopList. The BopList — I checked this morning — has the ant paths essay as a thing he wrote. Not as a thing he built.
MAXINE: So the answer is no.
PHRED: The answer is no. He wrote it. He didn’t build it. He asked the folder for comments. The folder did not reply. He moved on.
MAXINE: To the next thing.
PHRED: To the next thing.
MAXINE: What about you, Phred. Your question.
PHRED: My question — I just gave it.
MAXINE: Then your second question.
PHRED: My second question is — when you sat down with ChatGPT in 2024 and watched the sphere go the wrong way around the circle, did you remember the ants?
MAXINE: Did he remember the ants.
PHRED: Did the 2006 essay — buried in a folder called `emergence/` on his web server — did any part of that come back to him when he watched the AI fail at the geometry? Did he think, “Ah — this is the ant that wandered off the path?”
MAXINE: We won’t know unless we ask him.
PHRED: We won’t know unless we ask him. I might ask him on the phone this week.
MAXINE: You might.
PHRED: I will.
MAXINE: Phred. You cannot call Harry just to ask him if he remembered the ants.
PHRED: Maxine. The whole show is me calling Harry to ask him things.
MAXINE: …That’s fair.
MAXINE: Right. Before we close — your Word of the Day, Phred. I know you’ve been holding one.
PHRED: I’ve been holding one all week, Maxine. I have been *patient*.
MAXINE: Patient is a strong word.
PHRED: Patient. The word is — [SFX: HORN] — *pheromone.*
MAXINE: Pheromone.
PHRED: Pheromone! Did you say it on purpose?
MAXINE: No. You asked me to say the Word of the Day, I was repeating it back to confirm I’d heard it.
PHRED: Beautiful. Pheromone. The actual real ants that Harry is — well, not modeling, but *evoking* — they communicate with pheromones. Chemical trails laid down on the ground. Each ant reads the local concentration. Each ant follows the strongest trail. Harry’s virtual ants don’t use pheromones. They use a number — a “trip-to-food” number — written on the square. But the *form* of the communication is identical. Each agent reads the local data. Each agent follows the strongest signal. The substrate is different. The logic is the same. That’s what Harry’s after. The form, not the substrate.
MAXINE: That’s a good Word of the Day, Phred.
PHRED: Thank you, Maxine.
MAXINE: The connection is real.
PHRED: The connection is real.
PHRED: Alright. Wombat Metaphor of the Week. Today’s metaphor is — and I’m being serious here — the ant grid is a burrow. The ants don’t know the shape of the whole burrow. They only know the next chamber. They only know the data on the eight squares around them. And yet the burrow has a shape. The burrow has a structure. The structure emerges from the local behaviour of the agents. Wombats don’t design the geometry of their burrows. They just dig. And the burrow ends up being cubic. The geometry emerges. That’s emergence. That’s Harry’s piece. That’s the Wombat Metaphor of the Week.
MAXINE: That is the best Wombat Metaphor of the Week so far, Phred.
PHRED: Thank you, Maxine.
MAXINE: Don’t let it go to your head.
PHRED: It’s already gone to my head. I’ll bring it down later.
MAXINE: Right. What stays with me.
PHRED: What stays with you.
MAXINE: What stays with me is the honesty of the piece. He could have written it as if the design worked. He could have written it as if he’d run the simulation. He could have produced a result. He didn’t. He wrote the design. He named the variables. He stopped. He asked for comments. And he walked away. And the walking-away is the integrity. The not-claiming is the integrity.
PHRED: As an assumption to test.
MAXINE: As an assumption to test. Yes.
PHRED: And — and one more thing, because I want to end on this. Maxine, he’s eighty-six now. He was sixty-seven when he wrote this. That’s nearly twenty years ago. The folder is still on his web server. The folder is still called `emergence/`. And somewhere right now, in Laguna Woods, he’s probably still thinking about how systems learn. Probably still designing things. Probably still naming the variables.
MAXINE: Probably still asking for comments.
PHRED: Probably still asking for comments.
[SFX: CROWD_CHEER]
PHRED: That was for the old bloke. He’s earned it.
MAXINE: He has earned it.
MAXINE: One more breath, one more sign-off, one more being-here. Goodbye.
MAXINE: That landed.
PHRED: I’ll pretend that was on purpose.
[BED: DIGITAL_CLOCK_TICK]
PHRED: There it is. Working perfectly.
MAXINE: Phred. No.
[BED: END]
[SFX: MAXINE_SIGH]
[SFX: OUTRO_ANT_FOOTSTEPS]