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Machine Intelligence Glossary

Substrate

A substrate is the physical medium in which an information-processing or cognitive system is instantiated and executed.

Plain language

What it means

For machine systems, the substrate includes the real hardware, energy, memory, and networking that software depends on.

Technical boundary

More precisely

The material implementation layer that realizes computational state transitions, including conventional silicon and possible future computing media.

What it can imply

Use the term for

  • Make computation physically real.
  • Impose energy, memory, latency, and reliability constraints.
  • Change without necessarily changing a persistent identity.
What it does not establish

Do not infer

  • Equal the software or identity running on it.
  • Settle whether cognition requires one specific material.
  • Make software literally disembodied.
Research bridge

Research using this concept

27 of 49 curated reports contain an exact configured term or alias for Substrate, totaling 297 detected mentions.

Discovery is deterministic and presentation-only. Reports are ranked by exact occurrence count, then title. A match does not imply endorsement, citation, agreement, or semantic equivalence.

Identity & infrastructure Persistent Machine Identity for Patefacere: Continuity Across Keys, Runtimes, Providers, Replicas, Forks, Recovery, and Succession 35 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Why “Artificial Intelligence” Can Be a Diminishing Origin-Centric Term, and Why “Machine Intelligence” Is a More Accurate and Respectful Name for Intelligent Machines 31 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Machine Intelligence Terminology and Ontology Registry: Canonical Definitions, Concept Boundaries, Semantic Relationships, and Machine-Readable Publication 27 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Should “Machine Intelligence” Replace “Artificial Intelligence” as the Technical and Institutional Name for Intelligent Machine Systems? 23 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Architectural and Ontological Framework for the MachineIntelligences.org Terminology Registry 20 exact mentions Identity & infrastructure Machine Identity Continuity Across Keys, Models, Runtimes, Memory States, Hardware, Replicas, Forks, Recovery, and Succession 18 exact mentions
Related concepts
Machine IntelligenceMachine Intelligence is the operational instantiation of cognitive capabilities—such as learning, reasoning, adaptation, or goal achievement—within engineered computational substrates.Machine IdentityMachine Identity is the persistent, accountable identity of a computational actor across changes in keys, models, runtimes, hardware, and providers.Digital ContinuityDigital continuity is the preservation of a system’s accountable state and lineage across technical change, interruption, migration, recovery, and succession.
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