THE MAZE An Invitation

J.Konstapel,Leiden,29-8-2026.

The Self-Tending Net

There is a public knowledge net at maze.swarp.nl that never bluffs: every answer carries its source, and when it knows nothing, it says so.

This is what you can do with it, how it works, and where it is going

I. Try It in One Minute

Open maze.swarp.nl.

You are looking at a dome — a memory palace — on which 3.6 million pieces of knowledge appear as points of light: the English Wikipedia, the Metropolitan Museum’s art collection, formal mathematical proofs, recent research papers, music, essays.

Click any light and you walk to it. You see what lives there, where it came from, and doors onward: coarser, finer, its exact opposite, and the paths other visitors wore before you.

Or type a question in the bar.

The answer tells you what the net actually holds on the subject, with sources. And if the region is empty, it tells you that, plainly, instead of making something up.

That refusal to bluff is the whole point.

You will not find it in any chatbot.

II. What You Can Do With It

If You Are Curious — Wander

Every piece of knowledge here has an address — a place, written like 820@9.

Every address is a link you can share or cite:

maze.swarp.nl/#820@9

Walking has a payoff no search engine offers.

You see what sits next to what you were looking for, what its exact opposite holds, and which trails are worn deep.

Search engines answer questions.

The net shows you the neighbourhood of an answer.

That is where the surprises live.

Press the ⚡ button and you can even operate its reasoning engine yourself: load two places against each other and watch where the combination lands — on inhabited ground, or on a gap.

If You Are a Researcher — Read Its Agenda

This net does something genuinely new:

It treats what it doesn’t know as data.

Its address space is complete. Every possible statement has a computable place, so an empty address is a real, coordinated object.

Every night the net’s reasoning loop finds gaps it keeps hitting, articulates each into a precise open question, and posts it — at the gap’s own address, with the context that produced it and candidate answers attached.

Ask the net:

“What is your most important open problem?”

It answers with concrete questions and addresses you can walk to.

Near the origin of the address space, where whole disciplines live, about half the places stand empty: a printable list of candidate missing fields.

If you want research questions no committee generated, they are here.

Free. With coordinates.

If You Are a Journalist — Use It as the Interviewee That Cannot Spin

Every single item in the net carries a receipt:

who placed it;
when;
from which source;
with a link.

Ask it something and demand the address and source.

It gives both — or admits emptiness.

Its weekly report, maze.swarp.nl/verslag, is written by the system itself, straight from its database: growth per source, new open questions, the balance of what it holds.

It also provides an RSS feed.

You can verify every number in this essay against the live system, tonight, yourself.

Try that with any AI company’s press release.

If You Make Things — Leave a Voice

You can place your own words in the net:

a discovery, a poem, a life story, a response to an open question.

No account.
No email.

You choose a pseudonymous source name and a key. The key is your right of erasure.

Your text passes a strict gate: your own words become the evidence for where it lands. It receives its own address, computed from what you wrote.

You may attach a link to where your work lives — your blog, your channel. That link becomes your receipt.

Responses are woven to what they respond to as walkable trails.

Conversations here become paths, not comment threads.

It is the inverse of the academic platforms, where content decorates a reputation game.

Here identity is a footnote.

The contribution is the object.

If You Work With AI — Point Your Assistant at It

The net is built to be read by machines under the same honesty rules as people.

Send any AI to:

maze.swarp.nl/llms.txt

Its self-description for language models.

Or connect an MCP-capable assistant — Claude, and others — to:

maze.swarp.nl/mcp

It gets eight tools:

ask · search · walk · load · agenda · voice · receipts · discovery

An AI that consults the net inherits the receipts for free: a grounding source that cannot be hallucinated, because empty means empty.

And an AI that uses the net makes it grow.

Its walks become trails.
Its experiments feed the discovery loop.

III. How It Works

In Plain Terms

One idea carries everything:

The address of a piece of knowledge is computed from its content.

Not assigned by an editor.

Not ranked by an algorithm.

Not dependent on when it was uploaded.

Calculated.

The way you could calculate a postcode from the letter itself.

The address space is a perfectly regular tree grown from a single first distinction, refining by three at every ring.

Because it is complete, everything that could ever be known already has a place.

Because addresses are computed, nothing can be lost and nothing can hide.

And because two texts about the same thing compute to the same neighbourhood, related knowledge finds itself without anyone filing it.

Three House Rules Keep It Honest

01 — Never Claim More Than It Holds

The net’s conversational layer reports what lives at addresses.

When nothing does, it says:

empty.

02 — Quote, Never Copy

It stores place, name, source link and a fragment.

The content stays at its source.

That is why cataloguing the entire English Wikipedia costs it 2.3 gigabytes instead of a hundred.

03 — Everything Carries a Receipt

Including the net’s own machinery.

Even its classifier lives at an address inside the net, with its known flaws on record.

The mechanism is part of the evidence.

And It Tends Itself

Every night, unattended, the net:

THINKS
Loads pairs of addresses through its reasoning operator. It lands on inhabited ground five times more often than chance — a measured result.

DISCOVERS
Articulates the gaps it keeps hitting into open questions.

ANSWERS
Fetches each question’s best candidate answer through the ordinary sourced gate.

BALANCES
Recodes the most overcrowded region, a portion at a time.

FEEDS
Adds a nightly ration of new encyclopedia entries and fresh papers, from named sources only.

It never crawls.

Every Monday it writes down what happened.

No one edits that report.

IV. Where It Is Going

Three directions are already under way.

A Register for Mathematics

Proofs whose admission ticket is a machine-checked certificate.

Novelty becomes a lookup.

Credit becomes a receipt.

The design is published. The first 1,000 formal proof entries are already inside.

A Coder of Its Own

Today the net rents a language model to translate questions into addresses.

Every conversation is being harvested as training data for a small open model whose weights will themselves carry a receipt.

Nearer Sources

The Dutch Wikipedia and the Rijksmuseum are the natural next gates.

The net can then speak to its first public in its own references.

And above all:

More Walkers

The net grows from use.

Every walk, question, loading and voice literally becomes part of it.

That is the invitation.

What It Will Not Do

The boundaries are fixed:

No crawling.
No copying.
No ads.
No profiles.
No gap ever filled with wished-for material.

The bounds are not limitations around the product.

The bounds are the product.

V. Honestly

It is young.

Its coder still reads literally and leans on a rented model.

Its reasoning dynamics has one measurement behind it.

Deep regions are sparse.

Some crowded corners await their rebalancing.

All of this is on record inside the net itself.

And that is precisely the habit that makes it worth your time:

A system that publishes its own failures is a system whose successes you can believe.

Start here:

maze.swarp.nl

Click a light.

Ask it what its most important open problem is.

Then ask it for the source.

It will have one — or it will say so.

Hans Konstapel Blogs

THE MAZE An Invitation

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