I vaguely recall reading a paper about oracle bones and hunter-gatherers, with the central theme being a study of generating randomness by the means of an "algorithm". I recall it was on arxiv but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Algorithm being defined as: take a bunch of animal bones, burn them until they are essentially cremated, and then interpret the ashes somehow to point you in a random direction away from your village.

The idea was that this is such a noisy and chaotic system that you get decent enough randomization to distribute your hunter-gatherers into wilderness. The reason this is economical is it allows you to distribute away from concentrating too much effort into just one particular zone. A key idea here is that while maybe a certain river or patch of grass might have been historically lucrative, eventually the population will be exhausted. Without doing ample surveys of the wilderness all the time, hunter-gatherers have scarcely a clue that they are exhausting its resources.

So a simple strategy is to randomly distribute your collection of resources to allow areas to recover. At the same time, the model of relying on an oracle bone also makes it simpler than doing an exhaustive search of your "food-space" and if anything goes awry, it's because you've misinterpreted the divine spirits or you've done something wrong or bad. It's easy to cooperate if you all blame the same thing.

I think the article's tone is a bit on what I would wholeheartedly dismiss as outlandish numerology mysticism - were I to read this when I was just beginning to study mathematics. Now that I've read a bit more history, I have a better appreciation that humans by nature have always tried to impose order, symmetry and harmony upon the universe and have codified that language of understanding as poetry in all forms. I think the article is ambitious towards grasping at the scale and scope of mathematics not merely as a tool of human will, or a language science, or philosophy of philosophies, but something that is very palpably and tangibly human in form. There is a decent treatment towards the ambiguity of what an "algorithm" even is.

My overall impression of the article is that it is trying to describe something beautiful about how the process of mathematics has acted upon itself. Models such as cellular automata or recursive processes show how complexity arises from simple rules - order from chaos, chaos from order.

At the end of the day, I love to nitpick the treatment of technical subjects and their sort of phenomenal attributes in society - but it's posts like these on HackerNews that make me happy that anyone even bothers to write about this topic at all.