It was, perhamps, inevitable that the combination of enthusiastic students and a uninterested faculty would lead to the creation of a machine to explore the unknown and to advance the search for knowledge. Such is the case with Unseen University and Hex, although the underlying reason for Hex's contruction is probably the same as the one which has inspired so many other technological advances: we can build this, so let's see what it does if we do.

The official reason was the speeding up of the University's magical throughput. There are more than 500 known spells to secure the love of another person. Enquiring minds wondered whether an analysis of all these spells might reveal some small powerful common denominator, some meta-spell, some simple little equation which would achieve the required end far more quickly.

To answer both these questions, Hex was built. Part of it is clockwork. A lot of it is a giant ant farm (the interface, where the ants ride up and down on a little paternoster that turns a significant cogwheel, is a little masterpiece). The intricately controlled rushing of the ants through their maze of glass tubing (which looks as if it was made by a glass-blower with hiccoughs) is the most important part of the whole thing.

Hex redesigns itself and, although the students assert that it was they who constructed the Unreal Time Clock (a strange wobbly thing witha cuckoo), other features now form integral parts of the machine without anyone being quite sure how they accumulated. These include: a device a bit like a wind-speed measurer, blocks with occult symbols that dropped into a hopper (although these now seem to have been replaced by a quill pen in the middle of a network of pulleys and levers, which Hex uses to communicate in handwriting) a clothes wringer, a thing like a broken umbrella with herrings on it, some religious pictures, a large hourglass on a spring (which shows when the machine is thinking), a thing that goes 'parp', a Phase of the Moon Generator, an aquarium and some wind chimes. A mouse which built a nest in the middle of it all and was allowed to remain - indeed Hex stopped working when it was removed.

Long-term memory storage is achieved by using beehives and apparently, some kind of telepathic contact between the ants and the bees - placements of pollen and honey in the wax cells indicates a kind of code and, unlike more traditional forms of computer equipment, can be eaten when obsolete.