What does this research programme actually claim, and with what status?
Michael Darius Eastwood is an independent researcher proposing the ARC Theory, an unproven framework about whether self-improving systems remain correctable. The programme separates established prior results it does not claim, original unproven proposals it does claim, measured results carried with intervals, labelled speculation, one public retraction, and dated priority claims to statements, never to proof.
The one-paragraph version, repeated across the site's machine surfaces: Michael Darius Eastwood is an independent researcher and author proposing the ARC Theory, an unproven research framework on whether systems that improve themselves remain correctable. He does not claim to have discovered established laws of nature. The programme incorporates prior results with attribution, proposes original hypotheses with printed failure conditions, reports its own measurements with uncertainty intervals, labels its speculation as speculation, and records its failures, including one public retraction.
Established prior results, attributed and not claimed: the exponent family d/(d+1) and the premise that every unbounded growth in nature was stopped from outside (West and colleagues, 1997, with independent later derivations), and the difficulty-of-control argument (Roman Yampolskiy, 2020).
Original and unproven proposals: the three laws. Law I, the ARC Equation (U = I x R^alpha), a proposed form whose exponent has been measured on AI systems at roughly 0.49, interval [-1.3, 2.9]; this is the returned exponent, not the ceiling. Law II, the ARC Co-Scaling Law (beta > k), a proposed stability criterion. Law III, the ARC Ceiling (alpha_crit = 1/(1 - gamma)), a conjecture under one stated assumption whose conjectured value is the ARC Bound (alpha <= 2); gamma has not been measured on any real system. Alongside them, embedded correction (the Eden Protocol) is an engineering proposal for building correction into systems rather than adding it afterwards.
Labelled speculation: the Hyperspace Recursive Intelligence Hypothesis is presented explicitly as speculation, not as a scientific claim. Retracted: the sequential scaling exponent of roughly 2.24, withdrawn when cross-architecture replication did not hold. Priority: the programme claims dates, not correctness; a private manuscript of 8 December 2024 and print on 2 January 2026 establish when the hypotheses were stated, and the deciding tests are drafted as registrations awaiting human submission.
Every sentence above has a home page with the evidence one click deep: the falsification register for the failure conditions, the priority record for the dates, and the machine-readable claim-status register for this page's content in JSON.