The Secret Life of Algorithms: From Ancient Clay Tablets to Your TikTok Feed

What if we told you the thing deciding what you see on Instagram, who you meet on a dating app, or even what you buy online—wasn’t magic, but a set of instructions? An invisible recipe? These are algorithms—and far from being a modern invention, they’ve been with us since the dawn of human curiosity. Perhaps even earlier.

To me, these patterns aren’t just technological marvels. They whisper of a greater order—something divine, something echoing with the breath of God.

What we now call “algorithms” may be the footprints of a deeper cosmic logic—the same logic that shapes galaxies, bird migrations, leaf spirals, and even dreams.

What Is an Algorithm, Really?

At its simplest, an algorithm is a step-by-step guide to solve a problem. Just like a recipe for bread, or the migratory instinct etched into the mind of a monarch butterfly, it moves forward in a logical progression. Humans didn’t invent them—we discovered them. Like gravity. Like music. Algorithms are part of the fabric of things.

The Ancient Algorithmic World

I’ve long loved what some call ancient wisdom, but I believe we’re really talking about the ancient algorithmic world—an intuitive, symbolic way of understanding patterns long before the digital age.

In Babylonia, around 1800 BCE, scribes etched step-by-step formulas into clay tablets—for dividing land, predicting eclipses, or solving debt problems.

Aryabhata of India, around the 5th century CE, wrote stunningly accurate algorithms to compute celestial positions and trigonometric functions.

And of course, the very word algorithm comes from the name of al-Khwārizmī, a Persian genius who taught the world how to solve equations logically.

They didn’t have computers. But they understood order. They knew the sky and the soil were bound by recurring rules. They looked at bees, rivers, seasons—and sensed a logic beyond words.

Biomimetics: Where Nature and Algorithms Meet

Modern science calls it biomimetics—designing technology inspired by the forms and functions found in nature. I call it algorithmic inheritance. Termite mounds inspired passive cooling systems in architecture. 

The spiral of sunflower seeds follows the Fibonacci sequence—a perfect algorithm of growth. Hummingbirds’ wings, sharks’ skin, gecko toes, and owl feathers—each an algorithm refined over millions of years. These aren’t random. They are scripts of survival, lines of living code. God’s algorithms written in flesh and wind.

From Clay Tablets to Cloud Servers

With the birth of computing in the 20th century, algorithms migrated from parchment and pattern into machines. Alan Turing envisioned a “universal machine” that could use algorithms to solve anything computable. And it worked.

Now, algorithms are everywhere:

Google uses them to guess what you’re searching for before you finish typing.

TikTok uses them to guess what will keep you watching.

Spotify picks your next favorite song.

Amazon knows what you might want before you do.

These systems are fast, adaptive, sometimes eerily intuitive. But they are still just mirrors—reflecting back our desires, fears, habits. The ancient remains at their core: the steps, the logic, the divine rhythm.

God’s Providence and the Algorithm of the Cosmos

Some call it fate. Others, physics. I call it providence—the mysterious, often hidden ordering of all things. Look at the veins of a leaf. The way raindrops curve around petals. The branching of rivers and trees. These are not accidents. These are instructions—evidence of a great algorithmic design so vast, we can only glimpse it.

In this sense, algorithms are a divine language, one that stretches from the galaxies to the microcode of cells. The same intelligence that once guided shepherds by the stars now guides spacecraft by equations. What is faith, if not trust in a larger sequence we don’t yet understand?

Why the Online World Is Ruled by Algorithms

Because digital life is too big for human minds to manage. Billions of posts, photos, tweets, videos—every second. Algorithms became the stewards of this chaos, sorting and predicting, learning from us to feed us what we seek.

But beware: they reflect what we feed them. If our inputs are shallow, angry, addictive—so are the outputs. These algorithms are powerful, but not wise. For wisdom, we must return to the ancient.

In Praise of the Hidden Pattern

I believe the ancient world was rich not only in symbols and myths, but in lost algorithms—rituals, calendars, dream cycles, weather reading, even healing geometries—all grounded in the rhythms of the Earth.

What some call “primitive” may actually be more advanced in understanding the spiritual and ecological logic of life.We should not only teach algorithms in coding classes. We should also remember them—in stories, in seasons, in silence.

My Takeaway

Algorithms didn’t begin with AI. They began with awe.

They live in the language of God, the paths of birds, the shape of pinecones, and the stars over Windemere Hollow. And though they now manage your feed, they were once tools for the sacred, the mysterious, the meaningful.

We are algorithmic beings in an algorithmic universe. But when our codes align with the cosmos—not just clicks—we begin to rediscover a lost world: one full of wonder, not just data.

This spirit of structured seeking is what links al-Khwārizmī to the birds that trace hidden maps in the sky, or the roots of plants that spiral underground in pursuit of water. These are not random acts—they are guided by ancestral codes.

That’s why I believe the ancient world was an algorithmic world—where logic, intuition, and observation came together as one. And figures like al-Khwārizmī were keepers of that fusion.

Today’s algorithms, as powerful as they are, often operate without heart, without grounding in the moral or spiritual. But the ancients—al-Khwārizmī, Aryabhata, and others—saw no boundary between the divine and the logical. The cosmos itself was an algorithm: written in stars, carved into stones, pulsing in every living thing.

Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī: The Algorithmic Prophet

Among the shining minds of the ancient world, one figure stands like a lighthouse between past and future: Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (c. 780–850 CE), a Persian scholar whose name gave birth to the very word algorithm.

Al-Khwārizmī lived during the Golden Age of Islam, a time when science, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy flourished under the Abbasid Caliphate.

He worked at the Bayt al-Ḥikma—the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, a grand library and research center that gathered texts from Greece, India, Persia, and beyond. But al-Khwārizmī did more than preserve ancient knowledge—he transformed it.

His Book That Changed the World

Around the year 820, al-Khwārizmī wrote a mathematical treatise called: “Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-Muqābala”, which roughly translates to: “The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.”

In this text, he introduced clear, systematic procedures—algorithms—for solving linear and quadratic equations. It’s from this book that the word “al-jabr” evolved into algebra.

Even more remarkable, his works were translated into Latin in 12th-century Europe, where his name was rendered as Algoritmi—and from this, the word algorithm was born.

So the next time you hear about an algorithm sorting your feed or suggesting a playlist, know that you are whispering the legacy of a man who lived over 1,200 years ago, walking the palm-shaded streets of Baghdad, dreaming in numbers, and writing in the light of oil lamps while the Tigris flowed nearby.

Why He Matters Now

Al-Khwārizmī wasn’t just a mathematician. He was a bridge—between cultures, between worlds, between mystery and reason.

To me, he represents the sacred origins of logic—a time when science served understanding, not domination; when numbers were seen not just as quantities but as patterns revealing God’s plan.

He didn’t write code. He wrote clarity. He didn’t just solve equations—he offered a method for approaching the unknowable in structured steps.