Machina eX

The name

• Deus ex machina

  Greek theatre's god from the machine: an actor lowered onto the stage by a crane to resolve the plot from above. Machina eX turns it round. Nothing is lowered from above; the answer has to come out of the machine itself.

• Ex Machina

  Alex Garland's 2014 film, in which a programmer is asked to judge whether an android called Ava is conscious, and is outplayed. It is the question this programme keeps open: what passing the test would and would not prove.

• Intellectus Machinae ex Summa

  From the sum, intelligence. Machina eX starts from the sum of many uncertain signals, weighed and tested, and treats intelligence as what comes out of that sum.

How machines think, in plain words

• Neural networks

  A neural network is layers of simple units, each one adding up the numbers it receives, weighting some more than others, and passing the result on. Training means nudging those weights, millions of times, until the outputs stop being wrong. Nobody writes the rules; they settle into the weights.

• The Chinese room

  John Searle's 1980 thought experiment. A man who knows no Chinese sits in a room with a rulebook. Notes in Chinese come in, he follows the rules, perfect Chinese replies go out. To the people outside he understands Chinese; inside, he understands nothing. Searle's point: running the right program is not the same as understanding. Our Da Vinci guardrail is built on it, and tells the model it handles symbols and does not understand them.

• The black box

  A large model can give the right answer without anyone, including its makers, being able to say why. The reasons are spread across billions of weights, not written down anywhere. Machina eX's answer is to make every reasoning step show its working and its uncertainty, so you can check it instead of trusting it.

• Sigma ergo sum

  Our ARI paper moves from Descartes' cogito ergo sum to sigma ergo sum. Its test for a new kind of intelligence: not how human we can make it, but how inhuman.

The work

Research, not a product yet.

• Artificial Random Intelligence

  Research

  Randomness used on purpose: random starting weights and thresholds inside an ordered framework, so the system explores instead of repeating.

• Super Stochastic Intelligence

  Research

  Reasoning in probabilities: every belief carries its uncertainty, every step can be explained, and the system learns faster from being refuted than from being confirmed.

• MISIX

  In development

  The working name for Machina eX's engineering. Details coming.