The Ramon Llull's Thinking Machine for Automated Ideation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19200v3
• Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2025 16:14:12 GMT
• Title: The Ramon Llull's Thinking Machine for Automated Ideation
• Authors: Xinran Zhao, Boyuan Zheng, Chenglei Si, Haofei Yu, Ken Liu, Runlong Zhou, Ruochen Li, Tong Chen, Xiang Li, Yiming Zhang, Tongshuang Wu,
• Abstract summary: Our approach defines three compositional axes: Theme, Domain, and Method.<n>We show that prompting LLMs with curated combinations produces research ideas that are diverse, relevant, and grounded in current literature.<n>This modern thinking machine offers a lightweight, interpretable tool for augmenting scientific creativity and suggests a path toward collaborative ideation between humans and AI.
• Score: 52.06378166909451
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: This paper revisits Ramon Llull's Ars combinatoria - a medieval framework for generating knowledge through symbolic recombination - as a conceptual foundation for building a modern Llull's thinking machine for research ideation. Our approach defines three compositional axes: Theme (e.g., efficiency, adaptivity), Domain (e.g., question answering, machine translation), and Method (e.g., adversarial training, linear attention). These elements represent high-level abstractions common in scientific work - motivations, problem settings, and technical approaches - and serve as building blocks for LLM-driven exploration. We mine elements from human experts or conference papers and show that prompting LLMs with curated combinations produces research ideas that are diverse, relevant, and grounded in current literature. This modern thinking machine offers a lightweight, interpretable tool for augmenting scientific creativity and suggests a path toward collaborative ideation between humans and AI.

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