[gamacodre]

Couple of thoughts:

You are assuming that a pure function has access to some source of randomness. I think that's a bit less than pure unless a source of randomness is one of the inputs. Doesn't change your point at all, but it distracted me from what you were saying.

Speaking as someone who has occasionally invented new things, I think you underestimate the variety of outputs that can arise from a lifetime of accumulated experiential cruft and a situational fitting function (e.g. "we need a working teleporter to stay competitive"), without bringing in randomness at all.

[corethree]

Right and in this case you describe you'd be composing ideas to form new ideas right? And you'd do it within the parameters of the situation. So you would only select ideas that are in the bounds of "teleportation".

But then out of that set of ideas how do you choose which ideas to compose to formulate the new idea?

So you have idea A and idea B. And you randomly formulate a new compositional rule as an idea: A + B. Because A + B didn't exist as an idea before, it was randomly generated by you.

>I think you underestimate the variety of outputs that can arise from a lifetime of accumulated experiential cruft and a situational fitting function

Well it's actually possible to mathematically calculate the total amount of compositions If I know the total amount of experimental cruft you have accumulated in your lifetime. It's a combinatorics problem and the output of that is, you're right, extremely huge. We have fitting functions that reduce it, of course, but within this fitting function we're just iterating through all the remaining possibilities or aka "randomly generating" the new idea.