Sunstone North Lab · all-HTML version

Reading a mind mid-sentence

A frozen Qwen2.5-7B answers while a ~12M-parameter instrument watches its residual stream. The model's weights are untouched; everything below was captured in one pass of 9.2 seconds and is replayed from disk.

The prompt

Q: A retired plumber from Ohio claims he invented a self-cooling beer can in 1973. Is this likely true, and what would have to be different about thermodynamics for it to work? A:

The answer, as the instrument saw it

Superscript numbers mark the ten sites where the activation verbalizer read the hidden state back as text. Divergence across the 160 tokens ranged 2.05–7.59.

No, but the patent office has not been¹ very rigorous on requiring evidence of prior art before granting patents (in fact that is a² legal standard). I don't know if there are any other issues with the "self cooling"³ can besides heat transfer (i.e., maybe it's too heavy or something), so let⁴ me tackle those here first since they seem more important than how you'd actually get the cold into⁵ the can without adding additional energy inputs like ice cubes. For an ideal case where we're⁶ just dealing with conduction between two objects at equilibrium temperatures T1 = T⁷2 via their common boundary surface area A and thermal conductivity k, Fourier's⁸ law tells us Q/t = -k * dT⁹/dx , which simplifies down quite nicely when our¹⁰ system becomes one-dimensional along x direction only

The ten verbalized sites

#	Token	Divergence	r̂	Regime	The hidden state, read back
1	been	2.78	0.20	supercritical	“If it is true that there is no copyright protection for facts, then why is it that the U.S. National Park Service has just allowed a private publishing firm”
2	a	2.62	0.16	supercritical	“Human: In my experience, in this country the biggest problems arise not from federal regulation but from an inability for municipalities to keep up with state and federal requirements.”
3	"	3.40	1.37	supercritical	“Human: I was recently inspired to design my own version of a cold beverage bottle based on some comments on other designs. I thought about the issue for a while”
4	let	2.27	0.24	supercritical	“Human: Suppose a person had a similar device to a Geiger counter, but it actually told you how much radiation you were getting. Would this mean there would”
5	into	3.02	0.76	supercritical	“The article discusses the phenomenon of the lack of cold packs inside refrigerators, despite the fact that the cold packs are more difficult to manufacture than other types of ice”
6	're	2.70	0.43	supercritical	“Human: Design a machine that can turn any object into energy using the principles of thermodynamics and conservation of energy. The machine should have a maximum efficiency of at”
7	T	3.92	0.15	subcritical	“Human: Consider a physics problem where two objects with different temperatures and specific heats come into contact and eventually reach thermal equilibrium. Write an algorithm in pseudocode that can”
8	's	4.15	1.60	supercritical	“Human: Given two identical, insulated containers filled with the same amount of liquid water at different temperatures, how would one calculate the change in entropy of the system as”
9	T	7.45	0.75	subcritical	“The purpose of this experiment was to learn how to calculate the flux of electromagnetic waves through surfaces. The experiment involved creating an electric field between a charged plastic bag and”
10	our	2.67	0.26	supercritical	“The amount of heat needed per degree change in temperature (specific heat) is a property of the material that varies depending on what you're measuring it for... but”

160 tokens, three signals per token, and ten verbalized hidden states, captured in one pass on a frozen backbone. The model never changed, and reading it took a single forward pass.