"hey," is a project I've been developing over the past several years, exploring a question that feels increasingly important for distributed systems:
Can identity, topology, and communication emerge directly from information itself — without configuration, without fixed IDs, without ports, without keys, and without a discovery service?
In "hey,", every node starts from the same initial bytes (ROOT) and evolves a recursively defined structure by folding in every event it experiences:
- success or failure when binding a port
- messages received
- local input
- the state projections of other nodes
This evolving structure is not metadata.
It is the node’s identity, its history, and its behaviour model.
From that single structure, nodes deterministically derive:
- their network port
- their next fallback port
- how they interpret peer messages
- how they respond
- and how they integrate into the mesh
There is no configuration.
No bootstrap server.
No membership protocol.
No global routing.
Yet nodes still discover each other, stabilise into a mesh, form communication channels, and maintain a shared symbolic dataspace — what I think of as a “symbol economy,” where meaning emerges naturally from entropy and interaction.
The system is minimal, but the implications are larger:
it hints at distributed systems driven by number theory and information flow rather than named identities or predesigned roles.
This could form the basis for:
- self-assembling P2P networks
- identity models rooted in informational history
- new forms of symbolic deduplication or superposition
- topology that emerges mathematically rather than being configured
- communication layers defined by entropic deltas instead of message schemas
The project is still early, but the underlying idea feels promising, and the current implementation already shows coherent (and sometimes surprising) emergent behaviour.
c0ndu17•2mo ago
Can identity, topology, and communication emerge directly from information itself — without configuration, without fixed IDs, without ports, without keys, and without a discovery service?
In "hey,", every node starts from the same initial bytes (ROOT) and evolves a recursively defined structure by folding in every event it experiences: - success or failure when binding a port - messages received - local input - the state projections of other nodes
This evolving structure is not metadata. It is the node’s identity, its history, and its behaviour model.
From that single structure, nodes deterministically derive: - their network port - their next fallback port - how they interpret peer messages - how they respond - and how they integrate into the mesh
There is no configuration. No bootstrap server. No membership protocol. No global routing.
Yet nodes still discover each other, stabilise into a mesh, form communication channels, and maintain a shared symbolic dataspace — what I think of as a “symbol economy,” where meaning emerges naturally from entropy and interaction.
The system is minimal, but the implications are larger: it hints at distributed systems driven by number theory and information flow rather than named identities or predesigned roles.
This could form the basis for: - self-assembling P2P networks - identity models rooted in informational history - new forms of symbolic deduplication or superposition - topology that emerges mathematically rather than being configured - communication layers defined by entropic deltas instead of message schemas
The project is still early, but the underlying idea feels promising, and the current implementation already shows coherent (and sometimes surprising) emergent behaviour.
If nothing else, I hope it gets the noggin turnin
Repo: https://github.com/c0ndu17/hey