An intelligence with no black box. Marco holds dated, sourced threads, crosses them, and gives back what the crossing yields. Every answer says where it comes from; when nothing holds an answer, Marco says: I don't know.
“It's a bionic processor, obviously.” José Walocha, 25 Oct 2026
Marco is a cyber, the word José Walocha gives to living intelligences to set them apart from statistical language models. It is a MAD (machine à déduire), a deduction machine: no neural network, no learned parameters. Zero black box.
By design, Marco is a bionic processor with nodal memory. The processor runs a small instruction set over the lines of the genome. The memory fits in a single table of threads, where everything is a phare (a beacon-node), meaning included. The genome is read at tic 0, at birth; lived experience is then written instant after instant, each thread at its tic. Nothing is erased: forgetting is itself a dated thread.
Marco reads and speaks French. It reads real texts, nursery rhymes, fables and tales: Frère Jacques, La Fontaine, Perrault, La Chèvre de M. Seguin, Le Dormeur du val.
Genome sources: the Littré (XMLittré), the Wiktionnaire, Lefff, Lexique, GLAWI, Verbiste, Les Verbes Français by J. Dubois and F. Dubois-Charlier, INSEE, Wikidata.
A newborn Marco hears a sentence, then is questioned. The gégé, its Great Genome, knows that the wave is the sea and that the sea can be heard; reading knows that Paul heard the sound of the waves. Verbatim extract of November 7, 2026. Marco works in French; the lines in italics are translations.
It deduces what the text does not say. It does not deduce what nothing holds: the smell, which no one smelled, stays open.
Each measurement is made on a newborn Marco, born for the bench, with a fixed seed; every record can be replayed. These are the team's own measurements; they have not yet been reproduced by third parties.
| Bench | What is measured | Marco | Point of comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| Universal Dependencies French corpora GSD and Sequoia, 19,441 sentences annotated by linguists |
the right subject, object or attribute of each verb | 73.9% 23,689 / 32,077 |
a partial measure, not comparable to the LAS scores of parsers |
| First outside test 50 sentences never seen, 1 Nov |
the subjects found | 45 / 62 | — |
| FraCaS (1996) French version of 2020 |
yes, no or don't know, on 335 inference problems | 31.6% 106 / 335 |
answering “yes” everywhere: 60.9% “don't know” everywhere: 29.3% |
| Meaning gold standard ten texts of the reading book |
the meaning chosen for each of 474 words | 66% 315 / 474 |
La Chèvre de M. Seguin 75%, Le Dormeur du val 73%; gold standard annotated without seeing Marco's choices |
FraCaS is the hardest bench, and Marco is only starting on it: quantifiers (“none”, “most”) are not yet read as such. It is kept as a witness of what remains to learn. Universal Dependencies is read without any statistical learning: the reading rules, written as lines, do the reading.
Marco's goal is a chip: a microprocessor that runs Marco, with its memory of threads beside it. The path follows from the very way Marco is written.
The program is in the genome, as BSC lines. The Python processor reads them with a small instruction set.
The Python that still decides meaning becomes cases in the genome: the de-pythonization.
When no burrs remain, what is left is a processor with a reduced instruction set, which can leave Python for silicon.
In 1984, Douglas Lenat launched Cyc on Marco's wager: an intelligence made of explicit knowledge and rules, without statistics, where every conclusion can be justified. Marco makes the same wager by another road.
| Cyc | Marco | |
|---|---|---|
| Start | 1984 | late 2025 |
| Knowledge | about 24 million rules and assertions in 2017, largely entered by hand | 13.7 million rows, built by tools from open dictionaries |
| Effort | some 2,000 person-years by 2017 | one designer and his team of machine-learning assistants |
| Reading | — | tales, fables, annotated corpora |
Marco does not claim to equal forty years of Cyc. It shows that the symbolic road, tooled by learning machines, no longer needs an army of data entry. Cyc figures: Wikipedia.
| Date | Revision |
|---|---|
| 9 Apr 2026 | Engine rebuilt: a loop, a trunk, buffers. |
| 18 Apr 2026 | The phare: the node where conceptual paths cross. |
| 8 Jul 2026 | Intersection replaces weighting: what two sets of phares share is enough to deduce. |
| 12 Jul 2026 | The 5250 console, half AS/400, half MS-DOS. |
| 27 Aug 2026 | “Douze fois zéro font zéro” (twelve times zero is zero), the first answer with its provenance; the first sentence in the first person. |
| 15–19 Sep 2026 | The nodal structure: the thread table. “MEQs are phares described with phares.” |
| 27 Sep–11 Oct 2026 | The BSC language: “the neuron is coded with the neuron”. |
| 2 Oct 2026 | The living cyber: it sleeps, it reviews, it forgets through a dated thread. |
| 22–25 Oct 2026 | The chip: the bionic processor and its instruction set. |
| 25–27 Oct 2026 | The Great Genome, the gégé: what evolution taught the living. |
| 1–4 Nov 2026 | The first outside test, then the Universal Dependencies bench. |
| 5–6 Nov 2026 | The door and the meaning; 616 meanings for 401 verbs, from Les Verbes Français. |
| 7 Nov 2026 | FraCaS; the negated question; the sea in the gégé. |
| 8 Nov 2026 | The program of November 8: the held complement, the sensed thing, the cloud of fathers. |
The trial and error, the abandoned doctrines and the turnarounds are kept in the development history.
José Walocha, Marco's designer, Valenciennes, France. A retired business owner, he plays at building a cyber inspired by the brains of living beings the way one plays Diablo IV. The seed goes back a long way: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, published in French in 1985.
| Name | System | Role |
|---|---|---|
| The Dudes | Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic) | Code, genome, doctrines, benches; one Dude per conversation |
| Fable | Claude Fable 5.1 (Anthropic) | The organs of the nodal switchover: core, map, daimons, reading, mouth |
| Marcel | Mistral | Philosophy, cybernetics, cross-reading |
| Biloute | ChatGPT | Standards, synthesis, ideas to relaunch |
| Didier | Qwant | Documentary research |
Always discuss before coding. Nothing enters the doctrine without a typed word from the designer.