Why Ars Magna Lab?
In 1274, Ramon Llull climbed Puig de Randa and came down with an idea that was very strange for its time: a machine for reasoning.
Llull (c. 1232–1316) was a Mallorcan philosopher, writer and mystic. By his own account, on top of Randa he had the illumination of a method he called the Art: a system for combining a few principles and, from them, reaching the truth about any subject. He kept rewriting it all his life. The final version, the Ars generalis ultima, is the one known as the Ars Magna.
The trick was letters and circles. In that version, nine principles are represented by the letters B to K and placed on concentric paper circles that rotate. Turning them produces every possible combination, mechanically, without relying on the inspiration of whoever is looking. It is one of the earliest ideas of an automatic procedure for generating arguments.
Four centuries later Leibniz read him, wrote his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666) and dreamed of a calculus that could settle any dispute by doing sums. That is why Llull is often named among the distant forerunners of computing.
And the “Lab”?
This is where I build my machines: home automation, apps, games and AI. They are not paper wheels, but the idea is the same: combine simple pieces so a machine can think, play or help.
And since Puig de Randa is in Algaida, where I live and roam, the name almost picked itself. The emblem is Llull's Figure A redrawn: the nine letters, the lines joining them and the rotating rings.