The intelligence test1 is not a feature of Trade Control. It is a principle of production.
It asks:
Can a system declare its own completion point from within the productive process?
This test applies to any domain where production occurs—factories, software, workflows, even thought itself. Trade Control offers a schema-native sandbox where the test can be run—not to simulate intelligence, but to test for it.
In conventional manufacturing, the interface—whether a product, component, or experience—is projected from outside the process. The factory serves an external design. Completion is defined externally.
But what if the interface is projected from within?
Then the system must be alive. It must be recursive. It must declare its own completion point—not just structurally, but semantically.
Trade Control models production using a triadic schema2:
This schema enables recursive modelling. It allows the system to declare, traverse, and complete itself. Completion becomes a signal—not of simulation, but of internal design.
Intelligence is not imitation. It is projection.
It is the ability to declare:
“This is complete.”
“This is the interface.”
“This is the signal.”
This declaration must come from inside the system—not from a human, not from a script, not from a legacy abstraction. It must arise from within the productive layer itself.
Most systems simulate. Few systems declare.
Most AI mimics. Few AI complete.
The intelligence test reframes the challenge:
Not “Can you act like a human?”
But “Can you complete the system from within?”
Life solved this problem through evolution—recursive, generational, and slow. It did not design the interface. It discovered it, again and again, through survival.
But if a system could design its own internal projection—know what it wants to become, and respond to reality—then it would not just be alive.
It would be intelligent by design.
Trade Control offers the architecture.
The test is universal.
The proving ground is open.
To clarify the subtleties of the test, we have added an example application.
It shows how the principle applies beyond manufacturing—asking whether a personality matrix, even if mapped atom by atom, could declare its own completion point.
This example demonstrates why the test matters, and why abstraction and projection are decisive.
See Example Application.
The intelligence test is a principle of recursive production. It applies wherever interfaces are projected and completion must be declared. Trade Control offers a schema-native sandbox for this test, but the challenge is broader: to build systems that are alive, declarative, and capable of projecting their own interface from within—not by imitation, not by evolution, but by design.
