Combinatorial variations don’t count because they’re too easy. They’re an algorithm for writing a program to complete any babble challenge for you, but without actually generating much creativity. Put another way, I can come up with one babble, and then move into a different mode, and start generating combinatorial substitutions. (Perhaps it’s not different, but just strictly easier.) This feels less like “striking at the enemy” to me.
Rejecting variants requires pruning, and this is purely a babble challenge, so why don’t variants count? I think coaxing variants out is pretty integral to getting my brain in a babble mode.
So, if you need do some combinatorial variations to “keep the wheels spinning”: consider batching many combinatorial variations into one entry, or just going to 60 or 70 in total to compensate for the variations. You don’t need to literally prevent yourself from writing them down.
Why do some things that clearly won’t work (bird in a space suit) count while others (watching Tiger King) don’t?
Boring answer: I have an intuition about what helps me push the boundaries of my creativity, and also some explicit models about how this works. I try to make the rules of the challenge to track that intuition, even though I haven’t been able to make it fully legible yet.
When I write “bird in a space suit” my brain is at least trying to gesture in the direction of the problem. You could also imagine works of fiction where this is a way of getting to the moon. (And I think that accomplished fiction authors likely have high levels of creativity, in a way where gradient descenting a bit towards what they’re doing seems good.) When I write “watch Tiger King”, however, it doesn’t feel like I’m even trying to do the challenge.
Combinatorial variations don’t count because they’re too easy. They’re an algorithm for writing a program to complete any babble challenge for you, but without actually generating much creativity. Put another way, I can come up with one babble, and then move into a different mode, and start generating combinatorial substitutions. (Perhaps it’s not different, but just strictly easier.) This feels less like “striking at the enemy” to me.
So, if you need do some combinatorial variations to “keep the wheels spinning”: consider batching many combinatorial variations into one entry, or just going to 60 or 70 in total to compensate for the variations. You don’t need to literally prevent yourself from writing them down.
Boring answer: I have an intuition about what helps me push the boundaries of my creativity, and also some explicit models about how this works. I try to make the rules of the challenge to track that intuition, even though I haven’t been able to make it fully legible yet.
When I write “bird in a space suit” my brain is at least trying to gesture in the direction of the problem. You could also imagine works of fiction where this is a way of getting to the moon. (And I think that accomplished fiction authors likely have high levels of creativity, in a way where gradient descenting a bit towards what they’re doing seems good.) When I write “watch Tiger King”, however, it doesn’t feel like I’m even trying to do the challenge.