Idea Constellation — Creative Inspiration Simulator

Spark an Idea

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Controls

Concept distance Adjacent domains

Associative decay 0.62

Spread speed 6 steps/s

Readouts

Path length

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Domains bridged

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Coherence

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Creativity score

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Domains

How it works

48 concept nodes sit in six thematic domains (Nature, Technology, Emotion, Mythology, Objects, Abstract). Edges connect related concepts: dense strong links inside a domain, sparse weak "bridge" links across domains — a small model of an associative memory network (Collins & Loftus, 1975).

Each spark picks two seed concepts and fires spreading activation from both simultaneously. At every step, activation flows across edges and decays:

a(v, t+1) = max( a(v,t)·decay,  max over edges(u,v){ a(u,t)·w(u,v)·decay } )

The first node where both waves exceed a threshold is the idea — a concept reachable by association from both seeds. The chain of strongest-gradient hops back to each seed is the "train of thought" highlighted on the graph.

coherence = geometric mean of edge weights along the full path
novelty   = 1 − coherence
creativity = 4 · novelty · coherence · 100

The creativity formula is a simplified version of Boden's (1990) idea that creative value needs both novelty and coherence — it peaks at 100 when novelty and coherence are balanced (0.5/0.5), echoing the "inverted-U" preference for moderate surprise found in creativity research (Berlyne).

Concept distance — how far apart (in domain-graph terms) the two seed concepts start: same domain, one hop away, or opposite domains.
Associative decay — how much activation survives each hop; lower values only find short, obvious connections, higher values reach further for more surprising ones.

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