# ARCO
**Automated Research into Computational Ontologies**
[](https://crates.io/crates/arco)
[](https://docs.rs/arco)
[](https://github.com/kvernet/arco/actions)
[](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
A computational science platform for discovering the conditions under which computation, memory, and learning emerge in arbitrary information systems.
## What ARCO Does
ARCO asks a different question than most computer science: not "what can a given computational model compute?" but "what computational models are possible, and why do they emerge?"
It formalizes this through **Information Universes** — 6-tuples of (state space, transformations, observations, resources, invariants, schedule) — and measures emergent computation via shuffle-corrected normalized mutual information calibrated against destructive null distributions.
## Installation
### As a library
Add to your `Cargo.toml`:
```toml
[dependencies]
arco = "0.3"
```
### From source
```bash
git clone https://github.com/kvernet/arco.git
cd arco
cargo build --release
```
Requires Rust 1.85+.
See [`examples/`](https://github.com/kvernet/arco/tree/main/examples) for more usage patterns.
## Documentation
- [Web Page](https://kvernet.com/arco) — the web page
- [Mathematical Constitution](https://github.com/kvernet/arco/blob/main/docs/constitution.md) — the formal specification
- [API documentation](https://docs.rs/arco) — rustdoc for the latest release
- [Examples](https://github.com/kvernet/arco/tree/main/examples) — runnable usage examples
## Python Reference
The Python reference implementation that first validated the methodology is available at [arco-python](https://github.com/kvernet/arco-python).
## License
MIT