A Gas at Temperature T: Xenakis and the Physics of Stochastic Music

Iannis Xenakis used probability distributions, Markov processes, and game structures as compositional tools. Pithoprakta maps a Gaussian law derived from kinetic theory to glissando slopes; the orchestra is an analogy to a gas, not a thermodynamic system with measured temperature.

14 October 2025 · 6 min · Sebastian Spicker

The Hamiltonian of Intelligence: From Spin Glasses to Neural Networks

On October 8, 2024, Hopfield and Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Hopfield energy has Ising form, and Boltzmann machines import statistical- mechanical distributions. Those are genuine mathematical connections, but they do not make transformers, AlphaFold, protein folding, and spin glasses one causal lineage or universality class.

21 October 2024 · 16 min · Sebastian Spicker