The Anatomy of a Eureka, Part III: The Instrument, the Experiment, and the Limits
In Part I, I showed that creative transfer depends on two variables: semantic distance ensures novelty, but granularity predicts applicability, and granularity is controlled through compression to a discrete level. In Part II, I introduced two missing operations, inversion and composition, and formalized them as the Extraction-Inversion-Composition framework (EIC). The model is complete. But does it work in practice? The Calibrated Prompt Here is the prompt I now use. It implements the three EIC operations directly. Rather than a heuristic, the prompt is a constraint system designed to force traversal of distant conceptual spaces and prevent regression toward known solutions. Each constraint maps to a specific failure mode observed in testing: ...