Research in the open

Research as proof.

Eleven publications so far, all openly available. One has passed peer review: the short paper introducing the Concept Collider, accepted at ICCC 2026, the International Conference on Computational Creativity. The others are preprints deposited on Zenodo, each with a DOI, open to reading and discussion. They fall into three groups: papers on the Collider method and its instruments, surveys that map the field of computational creativity, and essays on AI, human faculties and what kind of science computational creativity is. The lab aims to publish every result with its method and its limits, so that each claim can be checked.

I·Collider ecosystem

P/01 — P/06

P/01ICCC 2026Peer-reviewed

Introducing the Concept Collider: A White-Box Computational Framework for Targeted Creative Emergence

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

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P/02Zenodo preprint · Extended version of the ICCC paper · 2026

The Concept Collider: Fracture-Targeted Creative Emergence as a Glass-Box Computational Framework

The extended, book-length treatment of the Concept Collider. Computational creativity has split into an interpretable formal era of limited reach and a generative era of vast reach but opaque behaviour; the Collider sets out to recover the former’s interpretability within the latter’s power. It models emergence as a precision-targeted collision along a concept’s deepest structural tension — its fracture — grounded in a proportional model (semantic distance × fracture homology), a four-step protocol (STRETCH → MAP → TARGET → COLLIDE), and validation on 424 collisions with adversarial controls. Because every emergence is traceable to its source, fracture and projectile, the Collider is glass-box at the level of process: a collision’s validity is read from its provenance, not its output score.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21444724 (opens in a new tab)
P/03Zenodo preprint · 2026

Introducing the Research Collider: Goal-Conditioned Concept Collision for Grounded, Falsifiable Research Directions

Ask a large language model to connect two fields and it will, fluently — the hard part is no longer producing an idea but trusting it. The Research Collider wraps the Concept Collider in a glass-box scaffold of selection and external certification, conditioned on a research goal: it steers a collision toward the goal’s answer-form, forges the result into a model that runs, and grounds its predictions against the literature. Shown end-to-end on modelling human forgetting, it occupies a gap no surveyed system fills — proposing and grounding a falsifiable research direction before it is carried out. The leads it returns are not guaranteed true, but guaranteed traceable, testable and aimed — which is what separates a research instrument from a novelty engine.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21445492 (opens in a new tab)
P/04Zenodo preprint · 2026

The Atomic Note as Bisociative Unit: Zettelkasten, Koestler, and the Latent Creative Structure of Personal Knowledge Graphs

We identify a structural correspondence between two theories never brought into explicit contact: Niklas Luhmann’s atomic note in the Zettelkasten method, and Arthur Koestler’s theory of bisociation as the mechanism of creative insight. The atomic note occupies the same role as Koestler’s “matrix of thought”; links across structurally distant domains are latent sites for bisociation; a well-maintained personal knowledge graph is therefore a network of dormant creative collisions. Fauconnier and Turner’s conceptual blending converges on the same object from a third direction. As a constructive corollary, we introduce the Concept Collider — the first computational system designed to activate these latent bisociations by targeting the internal fractures of atomic concepts — demonstrated on a real fracture-annotated vault.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21444841 (opens in a new tab)
P/05Zenodo preprint · 2026

Mapping the Negative Space: Fracture-Driven Gap Detection and Directed Generation of Concepts in a Glass-Box Creativity Engine

A creative generator is usually a black box: it produces ideas but cannot say what it fails to produce. Building on the Concept Collider — a glass-box engine in which every idea is a collision of two distant concepts along a fracture (a structural tension such as an internal contradiction or a hidden dependency) — we map not only what a generator makes but its negative space: what it structurally fails to make. Because every output is traced to its fracture, source and projectile, three kinds of gap become detectable with no apparatus beyond those traces: combinations never tried, concepts never pushed into their deepest tension, and ideas no concept in the knowledge base yet captures. The map is not a diagnostic but an agenda: the same fracture that locates a gap steers generation into it. A controlled test confirms it — targeting a detected blind cone steers significantly further into the void (p=0.04), at no cost in judged value.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21640318 (opens in a new tab)
P/06Zenodo preprint · 2026

Stretching a Concept to Breaking Point: An Empirical Audit of a Taxonomy of Conceptual Tensions

The Concept Collider rests on one primitive: a concept is a structure held under tension, and pressing it along one of its fracture types breaks it in a characteristic way. That taxonomy is load-bearing — every profile and every homology score is computed from it — yet it had never been audited. This paper gives it a first empirical audit and finds it imperfect: redundant, non-orthogonal and incomplete. Rather than discard it, it reconstructs a working tree of fractures. The deeper finding is that no taxonomy is canonical: different decomposition methods return different bases for the same data. What can be reported are the invariants — a small core of fractures (circularity, contradiction, self-defeating means) that holds across methods and across five model families, though less so across languages. They are presented as robust descriptors under this measurement, not as proof that concepts have a mind-independent structure.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22211498 (opens in a new tab)

II·Field surveys

P/07 — P/09

P/07Survey · Zenodo preprint · 2026

A Cross-Layer, Function-Level Map of Computational Creativity Tools — and the Integration Gap

We map the landscape of computational creativity tools across four layers — structured methods, B2B software, academic instruments, and AI-assisted systems — and five creative-process functions: generation, prediction, evaluation, navigation, and contextualisation. The mapping reveals a consistent integration gap: no layer covers all five functions in a coherent, end-to-end workflow. Closing it requires not just better tools, but a principled account of which functions each layer is structurally equipped to serve.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20746461 (opens in a new tab)
P/08Survey · Zenodo preprint · 2026

A Survey of Computational Creativity Theories — From Formal Rigor to Generative Power

A survey of computational creativity read through a single trade-off: as generative reach rose from the formal era to large language models, interpretability fell. We trace three foundational questions — how creativity is generated, measured, and explained — across both eras, and argue that recovering the interpretability of formal systems within the power of learned models is a promising path forward.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20746640 (opens in a new tab)
P/09Survey · Zenodo preprint · 2026

From Felt to Said: A Survey of Tools for Articulating Pre-Verbal Creative Intent

A creative idea rarely travels in one step from a diffuse, pre-verbal felt sense to a finished, communicable form. It matures across a crossing marked by three landmarks: the felt (internal, wordless), the shown (externalised but not yet worded), and the said (put into words). This survey maps the tools, interfaces and methods that support that crossing. Two lineages dominate and each stops short — one externalises the felt without words, the other produces words directly — leaving the hand-off between them, the articulation gap, thinly served. Reading each system through an autonomy-and-timing lens (own words vs supplied; early vs late), we set out a research agenda for the middle the field has left under-served.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21450946 (opens in a new tab)

III·Essays & perspectives

P/10 — P/11

P/10Whitepaper · Zenodo preprint · 2026

AI: Superpower or Superweakness? — Output, Competence, and the Human Faculties That Decide

Generative AI is celebrated for making users more capable and feared for making them less so — often in the same breath. This paper argues the two positions are conditioned by one distinction: AI reliably amplifies a user’s output while doing nothing, by itself, to build the underlying competence — which, under passive use, it can actively erode. We identify three costs of passive delegation — the atrophy of skill, of judgment, and of ownership and meaning — plus a collective one, the homogenisation of ideas. Whether amplification becomes a lasting strength or weakness is set not by the technology but by the user’s mode of engagement, itself shaped by design. We articulate a faculties principle — intention, judgment, taste and responsibility must stay human — and show, via the glass-box Concept Collider, that verifiable human–AI amplification is achievable.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21450601 (opens in a new tab)
P/11Position paper · Zenodo preprint · 2026

Computational Creativity: Art, Natural Science, or Design Science? — On the Field’s Identity Crisis and the Case for Native, Falsifiable Objects

Every few years, computational creativity replays the same question: is it an art or a science? This essay argues the dichotomy is malformed. The field is a science of the artificial in Simon’s sense: rigorous at the level of method (traceable design, goal-directed and falsifiable claims, a reproducible process), art at the level of reception. The criterion is not an absolute Popperian demarcation but a gradient of design-scientific rigour. Against the claim that a creative system cannot yield falsifiable objects, we offer an existence proof: operations built on a single primitive — the conceptual fracture — whose claims about novelty can be refuted by counterfactual substitution. The stance is deliberately humble: one more instrument in the laboratory a scientific field has long been building.

Sebastian Wahl · Emergence Lab

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21640482 (opens in a new tab)