Michael Darius Eastwood - start here

This page is the plain-language entrance to the work of Michael Darius Eastwood. It is written for readers who arrive from a search engine, a citation, a book review or a link in someone else's paper, and who want a five-minute map of what is here before deciding where to spend more time. If you already know the programme, use the research index, the priority evidence page or the papers directly.

Who is Michael Darius Eastwood?

Michael Darius Eastwood is an independent researcher based in London. His work is an unusual combination: an alignment thesis about how safety has to be built into the substrate of an artificial mind rather than layered around it, a formal scaling framework that expresses that thesis in an equation (the ARC Principle), a programme of experimental papers that test the scaling half of the framework, and a book, Infinite Architects, that develops the whole set as a coherent worldview. The framework is proposed and, in places, retracted where measurement did not survive blinding; it is not sold as settled science.

The programme is delivered under the byline Michael Darius Eastwood. In indexes and citation databases the same author appears as Michael Eastwood, M. D. Eastwood and Michael D. Eastwood. Those variants refer to the same person, working from the same OSF project and the same author profile at ORCID (pending) and Google Scholar. Any reader arriving from a search that returned only the shorter form is on the correct page.

The research programme in one page

The programme has three linked strands, and reading them in order is the fastest way to understand what is being claimed.

The first strand is the ARC Principle. ARC stands for Amplification, Recursion, Compounding. Its formal statement is that measured capability grows as input intelligence multiplied by recursive depth raised to an exponent, where the exponent is set by the form of the recursion rather than being a universal constant. The seed of the equation is in the 8 December 2024 manuscript at V2 lines 6 to 9, in the compact form U equals I times R. Papers I and II promote R to R to the alpha and make the exponent a measured quantity. The book presents the alpha near 2 case as its featured formulation. An early single-model estimate of alpha of approximately 2.24 was retracted and corrected to approximately 0.49 under blinding; alpha greater than 1 remains an open pre-registered prediction, not an established finding. Details: Paper I in plain English, the ARC Principle as the book presents it, Claim 2 explained.

The second strand is the Eden Protocol. Its argument is that alignment has to be a dependency of the system's own function rather than a fence around it. The thesis was stated in plain language in the December 2024 manuscript; the name Eden Protocol was applied to it in the 30 April 2025 manuscript (SHA-256 prefix 09f5b5e1); the full framework is developed at book length in Infinite Architects. Details: Claim 1 explained, April 2025 timeline note, and (site-wide) /eden-protocol.

The third strand is a measurement programme, the beta greater than k stability condition, that supersedes the fixed-exponent framing of the ARC equation as the operative safety criterion. This is the programme that a preregistration path and a 624,000 pound budget are pointed at. Its plain-language home is the Beta-k series in the research notes; its formal home is Paper X.

The priority record

The programme's originality is anchored on a small number of dated artefacts. The site publishes the artefacts, their hashes and, where the source permits, the raw email files so any reader can verify the dates without trusting the author. The three load-bearing anchors are set out below.

The full priority chain, including the intervening artefacts and a full list of 18 explained claims, is at /research/priority/ and, in machine-readable form, at /research/priority.json. The 18 claims each have a per-claim page under research/blog/ in the form claim-01-* through claim-18-*.

The book

Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything is the accessible-reader form of the whole programme. It develops the ARC Principle, the Eden Protocol, the semiconductor Chokepoint framing, the HARI Treaty proposal, the Three Ethical Loops and 37 named concepts as a single argument. The book presents the R-squared case as its featured formulation; the papers use the general R to the alpha form with the exponent open to measurement. Book positions that have since been retracted or superseded (the single-model 2.24 fit; the fixed-exponent framing of ARC as the operative safety criterion) are corrected on the research pages and in the Research evidence spine, publicly, on the same page that carries the current live claims. That is deliberate.

Buy on Amazon UK or Amazon US. Press and media resources are on the press kit page.

The papers

The current published set of the ARC/Eden research programme lives on OSF under the project DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB and is mirrored on the site under /research/papers/. The reading order most readers should try is:

• Paper I - The ARC Principle. Formal statement of U equals I times R to the alpha, preliminary alpha estimates from published data, the parallel-versus-sequential regime distinction. Companion note: Paper I in plain English.
• Paper II - Experimental validation. Six-frontier-model panel (Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Groq Qwen, GPT). Reports the parallel alpha of approximately zero, the retraction of the earlier 2.24 sequential estimate, and the revised robust regression of approximately 0.49 with a wide bootstrap confidence interval whose lower bound extends below zero.
• Paper III - The Alignment Scaling Problem. Alignment-scaling exponent estimates across the same panel; three-tier hierarchy of embedded, imposed and boundary-layer alignment.
• Foundational cross-domain paper. Recursive amplification as a pattern found in AI reasoning, quantum error correction, acoustic physics and consciousness science. Application of the bare exponent alpha equals d divided by d plus 1 to AI capability; the bare exponent form itself is prior art with multiple independent derivations.
• Paper VII - Cauchy unification. The family of power-law solutions of the ARC family expressed in the Cauchy functional-equation form.

Papers IV, V, VI, VIII, IX and X are staged behind a patent-hold page pending disclosure review. The master table of contents, when available, is the map of everything the programme has published.

The evidence base

Every load-bearing figure and date on the site is checked against the canonical facts register before publication by an automated truth gate. The three surfaces that a reader can independently verify are:

• Priority evidence. Verbatim lines, artefacts and hashes for every priority-record row.
• Research evidence spine. Nineteen externally sourced convergences between the programme's dated positions and later independent events, with row-level sources.
• Research evidence spine. Where the retractions live, in public, on the same page as the live claims.

Contact, citation and reuse

The preferred citation for the programme is:

Eastwood, M. D. (2026). The ARC Principle: Formalisation and preliminary validation of recursive capability scaling. Paper I of the ARC/Eden research programme. OSF, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB.

For the book: Eastwood, M. D. (2026). Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything. Independently published, ISBN 978-1806056200.

Author identifiers: OSF DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB. ORCID: pending. Google Scholar profile: linked from the site footer once issued.

Media, review or research correspondence: contact routes are on the press kit and link-in-bio pages. The research ask page describes what an independent replication of the beta greater than k measurement would need to look like and what the current budget ask is.