Mapping the Negative Space - Fracture-Driven Gap Detection and Directed Generation of Concepts in a Glass-Box Creativity Engine
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: 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. On a demonstration corpus this surfaces concrete unexplored directions and, on the order of twenty, distinct nameable concepts absent from the 200-concept base. The map is not a diagnostic but an agenda: the same fracture that locates a gap steers generation into it. We show the map is generative—a detected blind cone, fed back through its own fracture, yields a real concept in the empty region (e.g. attention → “attentional commons”)—and a controlled within-concept test confirms it: targeting a detected cone steers significantly further into the void than the generator’s default fracture (p= 0.04), at no cost in judged value. Throughout, a two-level structure (source × fracture = theme; projectile = mechanism) organises the space, and we check honestly that a fracture steers the kind of idea, not its value.Keywords: computational creativity · glass-box AI · negative-space mapping · conceptual blending · quality-diversity · blind-cone potential · embedding anisotropy · selection confound
Author: Wahl, Sebastian
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7171506316
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