## Pareidolia

Your chessboard example sounds similar to [pareidolia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia), which is roughly speaking when you see meaningful patterns in seemingly random data.

Just because you ended up with something that looks like what a chess algorithm would give you, doesn't mean that a chess algorithm was performed.

## What is a computation?

Firstly, I wouldn't say "the hill performed" anything, because the hill is an inanimate object incapable of "performing" anything. If anything, the "computation" would've been performed by the system containing the hill, the rock and physical forces acting on them.

Okay, so we have a physical system containing a rock in the shape of a chessboard, which follows some deterministic process to turn that rock into the shape of a sentence. Would that be a computation? This may be a question of how you define "computation", rather than a question of philosophy. The important question is how this process works (e.g. whether it's deterministic), rather than what we call it.

I probably wouldn't in general call it a computation, though, because computation tends to imply some structured process, often with a particular goal, which would not apply to a rock arbitrarily rolling down a hill. If someone were to have specifically crafted the hill and rock in order to go through that process and end up with the rock in a different shape, this may be closer to a computation (although perhaps still distinct from that). But one could also argue that computations are computations regardless of goals, so either both should be a computation, or neither should be.

>every falling rock could be said to be computing consciousness

No. Even if you hold that consciousness is purely computational, this does not mean that every computation is consciousness. That would be like saying an apple (consciousness) is a fruit (computation), and an orange (falling rock) is a fruit, therefore an orange is an apple. That reasoning would be very flawed.