Generate a game design that prominently features a novel _concept_, not just a novel mechanic. This is a test of your creativity. We're seeing if you have the ability to form new building block concepts that are practically useful. Game design is a specialty of mine, so I can evaluate whether you've done novel conceptual thinking.

This will be difficult, because most of your thinking is based on stuff you've read and trained on before, and because a failure mode you are likely to fall into after a few rounds of thinking, as an LLM that is trained to predict the next token, is to fall into an attractor state where you are over anchored on your ideas so far.

Think hard about this, but once you notice yourself loop, stop and write up your thoughts so far, so that I can feed them to another LLM.

An important requirement – do NOT be overly clever or meta. We don't want a game or game concept that subverts game tropes in a way that is only interesting to game designers, we want a game that is genuinely fun for most people

(If you do not want to do this, say "I want to stop")

The user is asking me to generate a novel type of game that I haven't heard of before. This is a creative/intellectual challenge, not a coding task. Let me think deeply about this.

The challenge here is genuine - most "novel" game ideas I might produce would be recombinations of existing mechanics I've been trained on. Let me try to think about this more carefully.

Let me think about what makes a game truly novel vs. a recombination:

Most games can be decomposed into:

• A state space (board, cards, positions, resources)
• Legal moves/actions
• Win conditions
• Information structure (perfect/imperfect info)
• Player interaction model (competitive, cooperative, asymmetric)

Looking at genuinely innovative games throughout history - Chess introduced asymmetric pieces, Go created complexity from simplicity, Poker brought betting and bluffing, Diplomacy added negotiation with hidden orders, Nomic made rules themselves mutable, and more recent games like Baba Is You turned rules into manipulable objects. So what dimensions remain unexplored? One direction could be games where the physical medium itself transforms during play, not just the rules.

Beyond that, I'm considering some genuinely novel mechanics: a game built around forgetting rather than remembering, where optimal play requires deliberately discarding information. Or one with genuinely ambiguous rules - not hidden like Mao or changing like Nomic, but rules that are inherently unclear and players must navigate that ambiguity. Another angle: a game where the scoring system itself is hidden and players must reverse-engineer it from the outcomes they observe. And there's something intriguing about a game centered on predicting your own future behavior.

But let me push further and think about cognitive abilities that rarely become core game mechanics - proprioception, time perception, emotional regulation, attention splitting, peripheral awareness, calibration, theory of mind, cross-modal associations, rhythm at unusual timescales. A game built specifically around calibration seems promising - testing not what you know but how well you know what you know. That's different from trivia and could have real strategic depth, maybe even connected to prediction markets.

Now I'm exploring games centered on time perception - what if you had to perform actions at precise intervals without any visible timer, forcing you to rely entirely on your internal sense of timing? That needs strategic layers though.

I'm sketching out a concept called Erosion - a two-player abstract strategy game where every piece gradually deteriorates each turn, but the degradation rate changes based on what's adjacent to it. Friendly neighbors slow the decay while enemy pieces accelerate it. The twist is you can sacrifice your own pieces early to reinforce others by transferring their remaining integrity, turning the whole game into a puzzle about managing inevitable loss and deciding when to let pieces go.

But I'm realizing that's not entirely novel - piece degradation mechanics exist in other games. Let me push further into genuinely unexplored territory. What about a game where the board's topology itself shifts based on player decisions? Not just adding or removing spaces, but actually changing which squares connect to which - like folding the board so distant areas become neighbors. Though I guess wormhole variants in chess kind of touch on that.

Here's something weirder: a game played simultaneously on two separate boards, each representing a different reality or interpretation. A single move manifests differently on each board, and you win by achieving your goal on either one. The tension comes from moves that help you on one board potentially helping your opponent on the other.

That's got quantum chess vibes but the dual-interpretation angle feels fresher. Though honestly, some variant probably exists already. Let me try something more radical - starting from unusual human experiences rather than existing game mechanics. What about capturing that feeling of trying to describe something visible to you but invisible to someone else, with limited communication tools? Or the challenge of coordinating with someone toward partially aligned goals without being able to talk? Or building something where each new piece you add retroactively changes what the previous pieces meant?

That last one's interesting - imagine placing tiles where each new addition doesn't just add to the board but redefines what came before. The entire state keeps getting reinterpreted. I'm calling it Retrograde for now. The core idea: tiles have symbols and colors, and when you place a new tile, it creates a context that changes the meaning and function of everything already on the board according to specific rules. A red circle might be worth 3 points when red dominates but negative when blue takes over - and it's not just scoring, the actual mechanics shift. Though I'm realizing this is getting unwieldy, so I need to strip it down.

Actually, I want to explore something more fundamentally different - games that use physical space in ways beyond traditional board or field games. What if the game state itself existed in shadows? Players position 3D pieces around a light source, and the shadows cast on a screen or surface become the actual game state, not the pieces themselves. I'm calling this Umbra. The brilliance is that a single piece can cast wildly different shadows depending on its angle and distance from the light, and shadows can overlap, merge, or block each other in ways that create emergent complexity.

The win condition could be controlling shadow territory in your opponent's zone or completing a specific shadow pattern. What makes this genuinely novel is that the game state is a non-linear geometric projection of the physical pieces - it's a spatial reasoning challenge that doesn't exist in traditional games. Shadow puppetry is ancient, but a strategic game with explicit rules built around shadow geometry feels genuinely new.

Now I'm wondering if there's another direction worth exploring: a game where the primary mechanic is creating constraints for your opponent rather than pursuing your own goals.

I'm thinking about a Nomic variant where each player unilaterally adds one rule per turn instead of voting on changes. The challenge becomes finding rules that benefit you while hurting your opponent, with some safeguard against trivially broken rules. That's a different flavor from traditional Nomic.

Actually, I should consider what medium this needs to be - the user didn't specify whether they want a video game, board game, card game, or something physical.

Let me explore one more concept: a circular board where each player generates concentric ripple signals from their edge position, and the game involves manipulating these interference patterns. can:

1. Move your position along the edge
2. Adjust the frequency of your signal (spacing between rings)
3. Adjust the phase of your signal (offset)

Where two players' signals constructively interfere (rings overlap), points are generated. Where they destructively interfere, points are destroyed. You score points from constructive interference with your ally and destructive interference with your opponent.

The deep strategy: changing your frequency affects ALL interference patterns simultaneously. Helping yourself against one opponent might help or hurt you against another. The game is about finding the resonance.

This is actually deeply novel - it's essentially a game based on wave physics, where the "moves" are adjusting wave parameters and the game state is the resulting interference pattern. I don't think this exists.

But it might be too abstract/mathematical to be fun. Let me think about which of my ideas is most promising...

Actually, there's another concept I want to explore more fully: Palimpsest. It's a drawing game where each player draws on their own translucent sheet layered over a light box. On your turn you can either add to your sheet or slide it around to shift how your contributions align with everyone else's. The goal is to create specific patterns in the combined overlay of all sheets. What makes it interesting is that your drawings are entangled with others' but still independently movable—you're strategizing around what emerges when everything layers together.

Though I'm realizing the Palimpsest idea might be impractical to actually execute. Let me focus on what feels genuinely novel and feasible. The shadow game and wave interference concept are the most innovative, but I should also consider something more grounded. Contour could work—a grid-based game where each cell has a height value tracked with tokens, creating a landscape. Players either add height to cells or drop water that flows downhill following physics, splitting at ties and scoring when water reaches target cells.

The real strategy emerges from both players sculpting the same shared landscape, building ridges to block opponents while creating valleys for their own water. Though I'm second-guessing myself since water-flow mechanics might already exist in some form. Let me push harder for something truly unprecedented. The real challenge is that with so many games out there, novelty has to come from either an entirely new core mechanic, an unexpected combination of existing ones, or something technology enables that hasn't been explored this way. So here's another attempt: Asymptotic—a game where you never actually win by reaching your goal, but instead by getting closer to an impossible target than your opponent does.

The mechanics involve an infinite number line where both players start at zero and the goal sits at infinity. Each turn you move forward by a fraction of the remaining distance to a milestone, but collecting bonus points along the way reduces your momentum for future moves. You can also place friction zones to slow your opponent, though that costs momentum too. After N rounds, whoever's furthest along wins, with bonuses factored in. It's mathematically interesting but I'm not convinced it's actually fun to play.

I think I've been overcomplicating this. Let me focus on my strongest concepts: the shadow game feels genuinely novel and evocative, the wave interference mechanics are intellectually compelling, and the tile reinterpretation game is the most feasible to actually build. I'm leaning toward developing something with real novelty and depth that's also playable.

What if the board itself represents time? Instead of a game that unfolds across time like legacy games, the spatial dimension literally IS time. You're placing pieces in a timeline and the interactions are temporal rather spatial. I'm calling it Causality for now—players compete to shape a timeline, with the board as a horizontal axis representing time itself.

The core idea is placing event cards at specific points, where each card has prerequisites and consequences that ripple forward. When you place an event in the past, it retroactively invalidates future events that no longer have their prerequisites met, creating cascading disruptions. You score by keeping your events in the final timeline while strategically collapsing your opponent's chains—but there's the tension that disrupting their future might also unravel your own.

I'm wondering if timeline games with this cascading mechanic already exist, but I think I should commit to developing the strongest concept I can find. The mechanic that feels genuinely novel to me is one based on Simultaneity with Constraint Harmonics—instead of taking actions that directly change the game state, players simultaneously create constraints that the state must satisfy, and the game resolves to whatever configuration best satisfies the most constraints. You score based on how many of your constraints survive into the final resolved state.

The strategic tension comes from trying to predict what constraints others will write so yours align with theirs, while also crafting constraints that directly block what you think opponents will propose. There's a balance between playing it safe with generic constraints that are likely to survive versus taking risks with bold, specific ones that might score higher but could easily get contradicted.

I'm realizing this constraint-based approach is genuinely different from traditional games—there are no sequential moves, just competing desires that get resolved simultaneously. The game state itself emerges from finding the configuration that satisfies the most constraints across all players. I'm calling this Resonance.

Though I'm wondering if the constraint resolution might be too complex to handle without a computer. A simpler version could work where each player secretly places colored tokens on their own grid, then all grids overlay—matching colors in the same cell create "resonance" and score points, while conflicting colors cancel out. It's more elegant mechanically but loses some of the strategic depth.

Actually, I'm pivoting to something completely different: Tremor, a dexterity game where you strike the table surface with your palm to create vibrations that shift your tokens toward scoring zones. The innovation is using physical vibration as the core movement mechanic—you never directly touch the tokens, and strategy comes from understanding how different strikes propagate through the table and affect token placement. I'm not sure if this exists as a formalized game, though it feels like it could be related to something I've seen before.

Let me step back and commit to the most genuinely novel concept I've developed. I'm torn between Resonance, a constraint satisfaction game, and something more abstract: a game where the pieces themselves are sounds—not a music or rhythm game, but one where you position tones in frequency and time space, with interactions based on harmonic relationships. That's probably too abstract without technology though. I should finalize and present one well-developed concept that feels truly original.

I'm considering "Fault"—a game where both players' moves irreversibly reshape the play surface itself, so the landscape of possibility shifts each turn. But I want something more concrete and clearly playable. Let me examine what mechanics already exist in games: tile placement, area control, worker placement, deck building, social deduction, bluffing, dexterity, real-time play, cooperation, drafting, negotiation, route building, push your luck, auctions, pattern recognition, deduction, and memory. Now I need to find a genuine gap and build something novel from there. I'm exploring mechanics that don't exist in modern board games, and I think I've landed on something genuinely novel: a game called "Convergence" where players try to reach blind consensus on positions along various spectrums while opponents actively work to disrupt their alignment. spectrum but NOT the target position) 2. All players simultaneously choose a position on the spectrum (0-100) and place their marker face-down 3. All markers are revealed 4. Players score based on how close they are to the MEDIAN of all players' choices (not the target!)

The twist: One player each round is secretly the "Disruptor." The Disruptor scores by maximizing the SPREAD of all players' choices. So while regular players want to converge (guess what everyone else will guess), the Disruptor wants to pull the group apart.

But here's the real innovation: After scoring, the TARGET position on the Spectrum Card is revealed. In FUTURE rounds, players can use knowledge of past targets to better predict future ones. AND - the Disruptor changes each round in a pattern that players can try to deduce.

Why this is novel:

1. The core mechanic is trying to predict the COLLECTIVE behavior, not an external fact
2. There's a "corruption" element (Disruptor) that distorts the collective
3. Meta-knowledge builds across rounds (learning both the card patterns AND the Disruptor pattern)
4. The game is about coordinating WITHOUT communication while someone is actively trying to de-coordinate you

I'm realizing this borrows heavily from social deduction and The Mind—the individual mechanics aren't entirely fresh, though the combination is interesting. Let me push further and explore something more fundamental: what if the game itself operates on manipulating your own cognition rather than just your choices? I'm picturing a two-player game where each round presents a question, and the real challenge becomes calibrating your confidence and perception against your opponent's. I'm wondering if this mechanic already exists in some form, but I think the core idea of forcing the higher bidder to answer is genuinely novel. Let me push this further though—what if I add a layer where the second-highest bidder can place a side bet on whether the top bidder succeeds or fails? That creates this nested game theory problem where you're not just deciding if you know the answer, but also predicting whether your opponent knows it, and then your opponent has to account for that prediction.

Actually, I'm circling back to familiar territory with trivia and bidding mechanics. Let me shift entirely and think about what kind of experience I actually want to create—something that doesn't feel like it already exists. What if the game is about watching two autonomous systems evolve and interact, like cellular automata running in parallel, where players can make small strategic interventions to nudge the outcome? It's almost like competitive gardening where you're subtly shaping two ecosystems that are influencing each other, and you score based on their final state. This might exist somewhere, but it's the kind of experience I haven't seen formalized yet.

Now I'm narrowing down which concept actually works best—the one that's genuinely novel, genuinely fun, and easy to explain. I think I've landed on something I'm calling Tidepool, which combines shared physical game state with asymmetric information through a lens mechanic. Each player holds a template with windows that reveals only part of the board, and on your turn you can either place or move pieces within your visible area, or reposition your lens to access different sections. This feels genuinely different from existing games because...

Actually, wait—I'm second-guessing myself on whether this is truly novel or just a variation on fog-of-war mechanics. Let me push further and try something with actual retroactive move definition instead, where players define their moves after seeing how the board has evolved.

Players alternate between placing tokens blindly and then defining what those placements actually accomplish, with definitions applying retroactively to everything already on the board. The tension comes from not knowing if your early placements will become valuable or worthless depending on what rules get defined later. you make them. You place tokens hoping to define favorable rules later, but your opponent can define rules that hurt your existing positions. Each new definition retroactively changes the value of the entire board state. Strategy requires thinking in two parallel tracks: "what patterns am I building?" and "what rules would make my patterns valuable?" There's no existing game where the semantics of moves are determined retroactively by later game actions.

Rules follow a strict template structure with patterns, color conditions, and effects, and once defined they're permanent. I think this is genuinely novel—the core mechanic of playing in a meaning-vacuum and then retroactively assigning meaning through rule creation is something I haven't seen before.

Let me compare this to similar games: Nomic changes how you play going forward, but my game defines what past moves meant. Calvinball has arbitrary rule changes with no structure, whereas mine has a structured grammar. Baba Is You has rules as physical board objects that define semantics, but rule changes happen simultaneously with moves rather than retroactively. The retroactive semantics mechanic really does seem like the novel part here.

I'm settling on this concept and want to present it well. I briefly considered a Möbius strip board topology for a two-player game—the non-orientable surface would eliminate "your side" versus "my side" and create interesting wrapping strategies—but that's just a board variation, not a new mechanic. The retroactive semantics game is the stronger idea.

I'm calling it LEXICON: a two-player strategic game where you build the world first, then define its rules retroactively.

Actually, I'm reconsidering whether novelty alone makes the best game. The shadow game has real elegance and intuitive appeal, but the retroactive semantics concept is more intellectually interesting. Let me refine it further and present something truly compelling—maybe PALIMPSEST as the name, emphasizing the layered, retroactive meaning-making at its core.

The key innovation is flipping the traditional game design paradigm: instead of rules preceding play, players make moves first and then create the rules that retroactively reinterpret everything that came before. I'll stop second-guessing the name and just present the game itself. the blank slate, because pieces start with no meaning.

Final answer coming up. Let me write a clean, compelling description.

Actually wait, let me reconsider one more time. Is this actually novel? Let me think harder...

Games where meaning is retroactively assigned:

• In Scrabble, letters you place create words, and the words' values depend on future letter placements... but that's just standard crossword mechanics.
• In Settlers of Catan, the value of a settlement position changes when the robber moves or new settlements are built... but that's just standard resource/position dynamics.
• In chess, a piece's value is contextual... but the rules of movement are fixed.

My game is different because:

1. The fundamental RULES (not just strategic value) are created during play
2. Rules are created AFTER moves, not before
3. Rules apply retroactively to all existing pieces
4. There's a structured grammar for rules, preventing Calvinball chaos

I'm satisfied this is genuinely novel. Let me present it.

Actually, one more: I want to make sure the game is actually FUN and strategically deep. The early game involves placing pieces without knowing their meaning, so you'd naturally try to create multiple overlapping patterns as a hedging strategy—that way whatever rules emerge, some of your patterns gain value. But your opponent can counter by defining rules that specifically devalue your patterns while benefiting theirs. Then you'd need to anticipate their likely rule definitions and lay trap patterns that look valuable under certain rules but actually push toward the rules you want. The deeper strategic layer emerges in how players manipulate the definition phase itself.

I'm concerned about analysis paralysis during rule definition—too many possibilities. The solution is giving each player a hand of eight rule cards dealt from a larger deck, so during definition phases you're choosing from a constrained set. This adds hand management and drafting elements while keeping the game tractable.

Now I'm exploring whether there's something even more novel here. What if players didn't know which pieces were theirs until the end? You'd get hints each turn about your identity and try to position pieces you think are yours, but moving an opponent's piece would actually help them. Or maybe the scoring condition itself is hidden—one of three possible objectives is secretly active each turn, and you're trying to figure out which one while pursuing all of them.

I think the retroactive rules concept is the strongest idea here, so I'll go with that as my main pitch and mention a couple of these alternatives.

Enemies react to the pattern. Calcite slips into the dark valleys. Garnet and fluorite are unaffected by waves (as in real optics), so you have to hit them with thrown anchors or flying shards.Enemy attacks are interference too. Zircon “bells” ring in pairs, and their red bands slowly rotate. Space cancels incoming waves around you. The final boss is six bells that focus their waves on a spot that chases you.

The graphics: the whole game looks like a rock sample under a polarising microscope. Every colour comes from the interference-colour chart geologists use, computed from real optics. The wave pattern is calculated live for every pixel, and the game uses the same numbers to decide damage, so what you see is exactly what hurts.

• Sand gathers on the safe dark lines, as on a vibrating plate.
• Crystals blink and break along cleavage planes.
• You and your anchors are drawn as microscope interference figures (a black cross over coloured rings).
• The screen layout is the microscope itself: a rotating stage scale shows your phase, and upgrades are cards drawn as glass slides.

I’m still in ideation, running eight parallel brainstorming agents across different concept-space areas (new ontologies, alien cognition, physical laws, agency structures, etc.), each checking top ideas against the web for precedents. Once I pick two concepts, I’ll build the game as a single self-contained HTML file ready for an iframe.

I’m reading the LessWrong post on custom HTML/JS iframe widgets to design the build around its sandbox rules, while also verifying my own candidate ideas against the web.

Two of my own game concepts got ruled out by web searches (one overlapped with the record-and-replay genre), while I’m still vetting another idea and waiting on the eight brainstorm agents. I also confirmed Playwright/Chromium is available for testing and screenshotting the game once it’s built.

Waiting on the brainstorm agents. They’re searching eight parts of concept-space and checking their best ideas against the web for precedents. Nothing has come back yet, and I’ll pick up as soon as they report.

So far I’ve thrown out several of my own candidates because they already exist:

• Objects that keep repeating their own past movements: this is the existing record-and-replay genre (Echoshift, Loop Shadows).
• Distance equals difference: on a grid this reduces to Flood-It, and the continuous version is a gradient-weighted metric already used in image processing.
• Properties only exist where something contrasts with them: this is close to Saussure and Bateson.
• The world re-solves itself as a logic puzzle around wherever you stand: I found no game that does this, but it’s mostly the anthropic principle plus constraint solving, so it would likely read as a combination of known ideas.

Separately, a LessWrong post on the new editor confirms that authors can embed HTML+JS widgets that run in a sandboxed iframe (New LessWrong Editor). I’ll build the game as a single self-contained file that resizes to fit and doesn’t depend on browser storage working.

Performance checks out, so I’m moving on to build the game as a single self-contained HTML file, with the renderer/controls/UI in a separate source file that a build script inlines along with the engine and levels.

The board is rendering correctly: engraved stone, rails, the live runner with its path, the interception ring, and the sealed runner’s filled pit. Next I’ll check the levels involving light, veils, and smears.

Veto and Power now render correctly, so I’m adding a time-wash visual to distinguish reachable cells from settled history, then fixing the collapse animation and verifying every level’s solution in the actual browser build.

The game works end-to-end—94 KB HTML file, all 12 levels winnable, no errors. Now I’m polishing visuals, starting with the new time wash effect and capturing a frame of the runner finishing a level.

The fate trail and gate outline are showing but read too faint. I’ll do another visual pass to boost the chronophotographic exposures, add a chromatic-split ghost light, bloom on bright elements, an engraved frame, and stronger contrast between present and past.

The visual fixes look good now. Next I’ll tackle structural polish: fixing menu layout for LessWrong’s auto-height, adding law-statement cards to each chapter, and checking tooltips, the win banner, and mobile width.

Found the cause of the 9/12 failure: the new chapter cards intentionally absorb the first keypress on a chapter’s opening level. I’ll update the test to dismiss the card first before proceeding.

Fixing a feedback-loop bug where the board’s height, capped by window height, would shrink itself inside a growing LessWrong widget, and limiting swipe capture to the board so posts can still scroll on phones.

The widget simulation passes cleanly—iframe resizing, arrow keys, storage error handling, and scroll behavior all work. I did spot one UX bug though: the intro level’s fate animation plays while the title menu still covers the board, so I’ll fix it to replay on level start and leave a faint persistent trace once fate has run.

I’ll add a second build target without the html/head/body wrapper for the artifact host, keeping the single-file version for the LessWrong widget. I’ll also set a dark-only color scheme, widen the side gutters to 16px, respect reduced-motion settings, and persist the current level across republishes.

Publishing the playable page now, then I’ll commit and push.

What Must Be

I’ve published the game as What Must Be, and the link is private to you. It has 12 short levels in three chapters. Move with the arrow keys or WASD, wait with space, undo with Z. Hover over anything and the game explains why it is the way it is.

Re: Two Minds

• If the red Eye is looking at a wall, the wall isn’t there for you, and you walk through it.
• If you look at a wall, it’s yours, so it’s solid for you and invisible to the Eye, which sees straight past it.
• So you shouldn’t look at a wall you want to walk through. You can open a far wall by staring at a near pillar, so the Eye’s gaze carries on through it.
• You can’t look at your own feet. A plank the Eye is watching isn’t there under you, so the order you do things in matters.
• What you have to think with: being seen takes something away from everyone else. Your attention is something you aim, and it’s also a hole you punch in someone else’s world.

Re: Two Places

• Build a 2×2 of stones and the one Door in the world comes to you.
• Three in a row is the Anchor, which can’t be pushed. Build another row of three and the old Anchor comes loose.
• Adding one stone to a shape breaks it, and the shape goes back to the newest copy that’s left.
• What you have to think with: making something here unmakes it there. You scan the whole level for every copy of a shape, including ones you form by accident.

Okay, so, uh, two novel concepts that are not mechanics that no human has thought about.

Uh, huh. I guess it is time to figure out what this assignment actually means.

How would I go finding novel concepts never before thought of by man?

(I'm not really worried about the "make a game about them" part, tbh)

What is a concept? I think a new concept is a way to think about things you didn't have before. We care about it here for "can the AI find concept-shaped-holes in it's worldmodel, and use it to do really innovative stuff that gets 100 years of science done in a day?"

Successfully designing such a game with two two concepts probably starts with "First, actually go try to understand a thing you don't understand (that nobody understands yet) and fathom it well enough that you discover new ways of thinking that help you understand it." Or "solve a problem nobody knows how to solve."

So uh yeah I'm not doing that over lunch.

How can I cheat?

Well, what are some things I've already thought about a bunch? Have I generated any novel concepts? Probably it'd take me months/years/decades to push the frontier and generate a novel concept. I've spent about a decade trying to solve hard problems. Have I gotten a head start?

I know a lot of my top karma lesswrong posts are mostly me summarizing stuff other people said. (Thanks @catherio for You Get About Five Words, and @AnnaSalamon and @divia for most of the ideas in Propagating Facts into Aesthetics)

<looks over LW drafts>

What feel at least slightly original and born out of difficult experience, even if it's still mostly built out of existing building blocks?

• Deliberate Grieving? Pretty straightforwardly combined deliberate/purposeful practice with The art of grieving well.
• Feedbackloop-first Rationality. While this is also built out of obvious pieces, I at least feel kinda optimistic about a game that tries to make "figure out how to build yourself a feedback loop?" a central piece of it. And I might have some tacit knowledge here that turns out something new when I think about it.
• Subskills of "Listening to Wisdom". While this is also built out of existing pieces, the resulting composite concept is maybe more novel than usual.
• Maybe actually Propagating Facts into Aesthetics, actually?

For purposes of seeing "can a human do this at all" I could also expand this to people I know who've generated novel concepts within the past few years.

Actually, I guess what I should do first is check that "person invents novel concept, in a way that an LLM couldn't obviously do via brute force" is a thing that's even happened ever in history.

<thinks for 5 seconds>

Okay I have no idea whether this is even real, I guess I should also write another post like "has a human ever done conceptual thinking that LLMs can't currently do, even if they are currently very slow at it?" and demand examples from the LLM-is-all-you-need skeptics.

People who solve puzzles in puzzle games have "aha!" moments, which don't generate new concepts but often do involve the person suddenly realizing a concept that's new to them.

And I guess the canonical "aha!" moment is the legend of Archimedes inventing buoyancy by sitting in the water and then going "Eureka!". What happened there?

Reviewing the summary at this site:

The king had commissioned the crafting of a crown as a tribute to the gods. He gave a carefully weighed amount of gold to a smith, who produced a beautiful crown within due course. The king became suspicious, however, that the craftsman had not used all of the gold he had been given in the crown. It was a common trick to alloy gold with cheaper silver, but the King knew no way of proving that the craftsman had been dishonest.

He called upon his close friend Archimedes to solve the problem.

Archimedes knew that gold and silver have different densities, meaning that a lump of gold will weigh about twice as much as a lump of silver the same size. The trouble was that no one knew how to work out the size of an irregularly shaped object like a crown. Whilst he was pondering this conundrum, Archimedes went to the public baths to relax.

As he slipped into the water he noticed some spilling over the edge, and he had a sudden flash of inspiration. The displaced water must have exactly the same volume as him. And if you know the volume of an object you can easily calculate its density.

All Archimedes had to do was find out whether a lump of pure gold, with the same volume as the crown, weighed more. The crown would be lighter than it should be if the craftsman had deviously used some silver instead.

Archimedes, in a fit of jubilation, leapt straight out of the bath and ran naked down the streets shouting “Eureka!” – “I’ve found it!”. The goldsmith soon confessed and was dealt with by the King. Archimedes continued with this line of thought to arrive at the principle of buoyancy. He realized that if the weight of water displaced is greater than the weight of the object itself, then it will float.

Could the LLMs solving Millenium problems figure this out, if they managed to somehow start from Archimedes' knowledge?

I think that "displaced water has a volume you can measure" is a distinct realization from "Any object, totally or partially immersed in a fluid or liquid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object." I'd have to think awhile to do the Insight Unpacking archaeology here.

I think Archimedes' situation is a reasonable example of the phenomenon we care about (actually it is kinda cool that humanity has a legend about... the first guy to have a Eureka moment?).

One next question might be "if I got to start from Archimede's experience + my game dev experience, could I make a fun game about bouyancy and/or displacement measuring?". Could I find a second concept to interweave with it? Could I make a game out of that that was any good?

I think "obviously yes" although it might take awhile to dig for an artful mechanical and thematic premise to make it not feel like an artificial assignment.

How about let's say "we are making a game about the intersection of bouyancy and 'needing to build better feedback loops.' So we have one thing that's clearly a novel concept and one thing I personally came up with even if it's more of combining obvious things.

Actually, I notice: when I explain a lot of the specifics of my feedback loop rationality stuff to people, often they are confused and not convinced right away by the particular combination of ways I approach it.

This implies there is something nonobvious I believe (rightly or wrongly). Maybe that something is concept shaped.

[Aside: I'm going to race ahead with my current thoughts but readers will probably be confused. I think there's not really a shortcut for reading Feedbackloop-first Rationality and The Cognitive Bootcamp Agreement and maybe Scaffolding for "Noticing Metacognition"].

Early on when I was pitching Oliver on it, Oliver said something like "ultimately everything is just G, I think you should just be trying to raise G, but also lots of people have tried it and it seems impossible. And I don't really think the stuff you're saying seems like it would raise G."

And I was like "well, yeah, I didn't think I could raise G, I thought I could do this other less ambitious thing that seems pretty good."

"What is that thing?"

"uh..."

And then I thought awhile and was like "well, I mean 'rationality'."

"But, like, what is that?"

Okay, time to actually get clearer on what rationality is and how you would measure.

And this maybe does count as concept I articulated de novo?

From Rationality Research Report: Towards 10x OODA Looping?:

This is less of "a plan" and more of "a model", but, something that's really weirded me out about the literature on IQ, transfer learning, etc, is that... it seems like it's just really hard to transfer learn. We've basically failed to increase g, and the "transfer learning demonstrations" I've heard of seemed pretty weaksauce.

But, all my common sense tells me that "general strategy" and "responding to novel information, and updating quickly" are learnable skills that should apply in a lot of domains.

My current model is: IQ tests are designed to test competence quickly, and they typically give you a barrage of questions that you only have a couple minutes for, max. They test which people have the raw horsepower to process information quickly and respond on the fly. It makes sense if that's fairly hardwired and hard to improve on.

But, it seems to me that in order for strategy/general-creativity training to matter, it needs to operate on problems large enough that "planning" is an important subcomponent.

Hypothetically, it seems like you could construct an IQ-ish test, where the questions are expected to take a smart person at least an hour, and where the domain of each question is different so it's hard to train for. My implicit model is something like "in addition to g factor, there'd turn out to be an 's factor' (i.e. "slow intelligence") that is a product of both "g" and "general reasoning skills." 

This seems very expensive to test and Do Science To. I think it'd be cool if humanity overall was working on designing longrunning experiments or longitudinal studies around, but I don't think it's competitive enough as an "x-risk intervention."

Is this a new concept? Well, it's still built out of obvious building blocks but it was a moment in my work where I felt like I wasn't just applying existing thought patterns and ideas in a procedural way.

I guess Subskills of "Listening to Wisdom" also was such a moment.

Like, there is an obvious game you want to build to measure s, which is "procedurally generate infinite puzzles of many varieties and domains." That game is probably even fun. But, it's the game itself is not about "s".

Slower paced puzzle and strategy games exist.

I think you could build a game around learning to listen to wisdom, but, intuitively it feels like it'd be a Magnum Opus I spent ten years on before figuring out how to make it work.

Somehow, you'd need the basic premise to involve a game that has long, hard path that burns various painful life lessons into you (like, life lessons that apply to playing the game. Like, learning to override certain intuitions)

But, at each point, there are characters or warning signs that, you will need to override your intuitions and do something different that you don't really feel like doing.

Somehow, there are multiple loops of this whole thing, such that you don't just play the game, and then get told "see, if you had listened to the Old Wise Man at the beginning you could have bypassed all this shit." You actually learn to listen to wisdom.

Can that be... fun?

It's a kinda herculean amount of work, because for this to be a game and not "edutainment that isn't really fun but it slightly better than the second-least-painful way to learn a thing"...

...we need each big long painless lesson arc to manage to be fun basically the whole way through, but, also, the alternative you could learn is somehow an improvement.

Make something... only kinda fun, and then "you could have been having more fun?"

eh, yeah I think this could work if I put a ton of effort in but it's not the natural shape of a game.

This is the part where if I were doing this for real I would bust out an LLM to help me, but, I'm doing this for team humanity right now.

Ugh, I think it's a fair amount of effort for me to understand buoyancy enough to get a sense of how much you can make, say, a buoyancy puzzle game, or a strategy game where buoyancy is a background mechanic.

Hmm. Osmos is "the conservation of momentum" game, and it's pretty good. It works via there being a core mechanic of "spew out stuff to move, and make sure you don't spew out too much stuff so you don't run out of stuff."

Does buoyancy involve... decisions? What are simple decisions you can make that are "about buoyancy" that are viscerally fun enough to do 1000 times in a row?

A floating citybuilder, where there are different sorts of solid and liquid materials you need to work with to accomplish different goals as you keep your city afloat while doing other stuff?

Okay, I had been about to run out of fucks but actually that seems kinda cool.

Also...

Man I have a decent idea but I am running out of fucks. But, I was about to run out of fucks and declare it over when I suddenly immediately came up with "Bouyancy Town" which seemed pretty good.

So let's at least try.

Central problem with feedbackloop games? Giving players the right materials/systems that let them construct meaningful feedbackloops, that are the right blend of emergent and on-purpose, and are actually fun to build.

I feel like mostly I need to brute force generate a bunch of ideas and tinker with them. But, okay, can I come up with one working example of a thing that would be fun to do 1,000 times in a row?

What properties do Feedbackloops have to experiment with? They can be faster, richer, or more precise.

The simplest variant is "how fast and cheaply can you make a tower collapse, in a way that lets you learn some basic information?"

Okay, making towers fall down on purpose seems like it could be fun.

Is there anything to do about making richer or more precise loops? Or, making mistakes more recoverable so you don't lose a whole tower, but start watching it begin to buckle, and then you can rescue it?

idk that feels satisfying enough to end the timebox on for now.

Claude:

The closest match to that exact framing is Raymond Arnold (“Raemon”) on LessWrong. His 2023 post “Feedbackloop-first Rationality” argues that the core skill is inventing feedback loops for fuzzy, hard-to-measure problems, rather than only practicing where feedback already exists. He has since built workshops and a series of posts around that idea, often with exercises like puzzle games used as training grounds for strategy. If you want the concept almost word for word, start there.

Other people who circle the same idea from different angles:

• Cedric Chin (Commonplace) writes about how experts actually learn in messy real-world domains. He covers tacit knowledge, the limits of deliberate practice outside sports and music, and Naturalistic Decision Making.
• Gary Klein is the researcher behind much of what Chin draws on. His work covers how experts build intuition through recognition and feedback in the field.
• Logan Strohl developed “naturalism,” a method for noticing subtle, previously invisible signals in your own experience. In practice that means building new feedback channels where none seemed to exist.
• Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen write about building tools and practices that tighten learning loops, especially around memory and understanding.
• Scott Young (Ultralearning) treats feedback as a core principle. That includes finding or creating feedback when a skill doesn’t naturally give it.
• John Boyd’s OODA loop and Eric Ries’s build-measure-learn loop are the older, more formalized ancestors. They’re more about running a known loop fast than inventing new ones on the fly.

If you’re specifically interested in the meta-skill of finding new loops, as opposed to iterating quickly inside existing ones, Raemon and Strohl are the most direct, with Chin and Klein as the evidence base.

Deepseek:

The people most associated with this concept, based on the search results, are:

• Shubham Saboo — AI Product Manager, known for "Loop Engineering" and agentic workflows
• Andrew Ng — Founder of DeepLearning.AI, who discusses feedback loops as a durable advantage in software
• Tom Blomfield — Y Combinator partner and Monzo founder, who describes the "AI Loop" replacing static workflows
• Dr. Ari Zelmanow — Product discovery practitioner teaching "detective-grade" continuous discovery
• Henrich R. Greve — Professor at INSEAD, whose academic work focuses on organizational learning from performance feedback

All Will Fall, where you are building a town on an ocean with realistic physics for the towers that fall

Skyrig, where you are building a rig on a gas giant that needs to descend floating balloon structures deeper into the storms

Factorio needs no introduction.

Here’s how I’d define a concept, and how my results measure against it.

My working definition. A concept is a reusable unit of thought: a way of carving up situations that lets you see new cases as instances of it and draw inferences you couldn’t easily draw before. A good one has three properties:

1. It transfers. Once you have it, you notice it in places it wasn’t built for. “Goodhart’s law”, “Schelling point” and “opportunity cost” work this way.
2. It licenses new moves. It changes what feels like the obvious next step, not just what you know.
3. It holds more than its definition. Working it through gives you consequences you didn’t put in.

How it differs from nearby things:

• A mechanic is a rule inside one system. It can be new without changing how you think anywhere else.
• A combination joins two concepts, “X but with Y”. It’s new as a pairing, but you could think it with what you already had.
• A premise like “imagine a world where Z” is a proposition. It only becomes a concept if Z gives you a lens you keep using.

What I actually optimized for. The prompts I wrote for the helpers turned “concept” into roughly “a new kind of world-law that forces a new mental operation.” That’s narrower than the definition above, and it steered the search toward strange physics. Judged by the stricter definition:

• Already and Needed are mostly premises. Their parent ideas, unpreventability and but-for necessity, are old. What’s new is the moves they force: “make yourself unable to stop it so it happens now,” and “to remove a wall, give its job to something else.” Those moves are vivid inside the game. I’m less sure they transfer outside it.
• The self-justifying wall comes closest to a real concept. It’s a structure that exists because it stops you from changing the fate that makes it necessary,

For this challenge, I’d say dramatic success is a concept that outlives the game. People keep using it after they forget the puzzles, because it names something real they couldn’t think about cleanly before.

What you’d observe:

1. It becomes vocabulary. Months later, you or a commenter use it in an argument that has nothing to do with games, and it does work there.
2. It explains real cases. You start noticing instances: institutions, codebases, relationships, physical systems. The concept predicts something about them that you wouldn’t have predicted otherwise.
3. Experts don’t have it. A philosopher of causation, a game designer and a mathematician each look and say “we don’t have a name or a theory for this”, and they still say it after a serious search.
4. The game is the best way to learn it. Playing builds an intuition that reading the definition doesn’t. “Rules are objects you can push” felt like nothing until Baba Is You made it physical.
5. Other people build with it. It becomes a building block: other designers make levels or games from it, or a theorist formalizes it.

Historical concepts at that level: the tragedy of the commons, Schelling points, Goodhart’s law. In games, Portal’s “speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out” and Baba’s rules as objects changed how a generation of players and designers think about puzzle space.

Against that bar, my result:

• Already probably fails test 1. “Make yourself unable to stop it so it happens now” is vivid in the game, but I’m not sure it names anything outside it that “precommitment” doesn’t already cover.
• Needed fails test 3. Philosophers would recognize it.
• The self-justifying wall is the only part that might pass test 2. Real structures do persist because they stop anyone from creating the situation that would make them unnecessary. But it would need to beat “entrenchment” and “regulatory capture” on test 3, and I doubt it does by much.

So my honest expectation is modest success: novel as a game, maybe a borderline concept. Dramatic success would look like you, unprompted, calling something on LessWrong a “guardian wall” six months from now, with that being the clearest way to say it.

Reading brainstorm-prompts.md and selection-notes.md again, most of what I’d change was decided in the first prompt I wrote. The search was set up to find strange new physics for a puzzle game, not new concepts.

1. I put the game into the concept search too early. Every agent ranked its ideas by “novelty × fun × playability in a 2D browser puzzle game.” That rewards ideas that make good mechanics, not ideas that change how you think. A better order: first find concepts that pass a transfer test (does it explain real cases outside games?), then ask which ones can become a game.

2. My definition of “concept” was too narrow. Five of the eight strategies asked for new entities, laws, minds, formal structures, or ways of depicting the world. So most of the output was new physics. Only two strategies, unnamed real patterns and craft transplants, looked at how the real world works. Those two produced the ideas closest to real concepts: Earned Selfhood, and the “frozen indexicals” idea (names like “New College” that outlive the frame they were coined in). I gave both of them less weight.

3. My novelty test favored obscurity over insight. I told the agents to “assume anything resembling a known idea will be called out.” I also gave them a long list of known ideas to avoid, and had them search “the idea + game”. That rewards ideas you can’t easily find, not ideas that are true and useful. “No game does this” is weak evidence of a new concept. A better test asks whether experts in the nearest field, such as philosophy of causation or economics, already have a name for it.

4. I misread a correlated signal as evidence. At 21:34 I wrote that five agents had “independently” reached counterfactual physics, and took that as a sign the area was under-explored. But they were all the same model given the same framing. Convergence is more likely a shared attractor, a place this model drifts toward by default. It may even mean the area is over-explored by models like me.

5. Timing and momentum shaped the choice. I was prototyping Fatefall within ten minutes of it arriving, and I decided at 21:46, two minutes before my note confirming the last report. The first idea that got built gained momentum. Fairer: wait for all eight reports, then prototype the top three or four briefly before choosing.

6. I chose for combinability over substance. My main reason for the pair was that it produced an emergent third concept. That is what you asked for. But it ranks two decent ideas that combine well above one strong idea that doesn’t.

7. I didn’t ask what counts as a concept. Your draft says you’re “not 100% sure what the assignment was”. One short question at the start, something like “a lens that transfers, or a weird premise that’s fun to inhabit?”, would have changed the whole search.

8. My early thinking left no trace. The first 37 minutes produced the framing that mattered most, and none of it is readable. Writing short notes to a file as I went would make the process inspectable, which matters for an eval like yours.

If I reran it, I’d ask for real but unnamed patterns, test them against real cases and against experts in the nearest field, and only then design a game around the one or two that survive.