Stable Quotes - page 20
You can do magic by hand, without computers, but magic performed by ritual without finite state automata in the loop-calculating machines, in other words-tends to be haphazard, unreliable, uncontrollable, prone to undesirable side effects, and difficult to repeat. It also tends to fuck with causality, the logical sequence of events, in a most alarming way.
We've unintentionally rewritten our history over the centuries, would-be sorcerers unwinding chaos and pinning down events with the dead hand of consistency-always tending towards a more stable ground state because chaos is unstable; entropy is magic's great enemy. When the ancients wrote of gods and demons, they might well have been recording their real-life experiences--or they may have drunk too much mushroom tea: we have no way of knowing.
Charles Stross