Creative Brainstorming Simulation

Brainstorm Controls

Participants 4

Novelty (wild-idea rate) 40%

Build-on-others rate 55%

Idea rate 1.5 / s

Idea Network

Total ideas

Fluency

— /min

Originality

0.00

Idea clusters

How it works

Each of the coloured orbs is a simulated brainstorming participant wandering through a shared 3D "idea-space". At a controllable rate they each drop a new idea (a small sphere) following Osborn's classic brainstorming rules, modelled as a stochastic branching process:

with prob. buildOn:  spawn center = position of a random existing idea
else:                spawn center = the participant's own position

with prob. p_wild = 0.08 + 0.35 · novelty:
   idea = uniform random point in the idea-space  (a "wild" idea)
else:
   idea = center + N(0, sigma),  sigma = 0.25 + 2.0 · novelty  (association)

This is a simple computational analogue of two well-studied creativity mechanisms:

Divergent thinking — the novelty slider raises both the wild-jump probability and the spread (sigma) of associative jumps, scattering ideas further from what already exists.
Convergent / associative thinking — the build-on-others slider raises how often a new idea branches off an existing one instead of the participant's own train of thought (a line marks that "builds on" link), the mechanism behind Mednick's associative theory of creativity.

Every ~0.6s the sim re-clusters all currently visible ideas with a union–find over pairwise distance (any two ideas closer than a fixed radius are merged into the same cluster), colouring each idea by its cluster — a rough stand-in for ideas converging into shared "themes". Originality is the mean distance of visible ideas from their common centroid: a purely associative session collapses toward a tight ball (low originality, few clusters); a high-novelty session spreads out and fragments into many small clusters.

Participant Idea (coloured by cluster) "Builds on" link

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