The Ontology of the Alien: World-Diversity Search and Evolving Solution Ontologies

Abstract

Open-ended problems such as institutional design lack enumerable solution spaces and cheap automatic evaluators. World-diversity search moves variation upstream. Target-independent Builders construct textual worlds with altered causal rules; purpose-blind Solvers address the same target under each rule set; and compilers translate the resulting mechanisms into a common target-domain schema. Building on this previously released operator, this paper introduces ontology-governed intervention search. A Taxonomist curates a persistent typed ontology of complete interventions, redirects structurally repetitive proposals, revises categories, and returns the changed map to fresh Explorers. Together, the operators provide the expansion stage of a proposed expansion-before-optimization pipeline: diversify causal premises, then make the resulting candidate population cumulative and steerable. Across eight workflows on one retirement-design problem, the released system produced 196 candidate records; its world stage comprised 25 world-and-solve branches. An unblinded post-hoc census classified bottleneck relief as clear in 17 branches and partial in eight; all 25 Solvers added multi-component architecture beyond the stipulated premise. Seven complete rejection–redirection–mechanism-change chains appeared across 75 planned graph positions. These artifacts document automated fan-out, premise-conditioned generation, and graph-conditioned redirection, but do not establish external novelty, utility, causal performance, cross-domain generality, or large-scale efficiency.