Scientific record
Priority: Second, after Project Fiction and before Project Daydream.
Working definition
Project Imagination studies deliberate possible-world construction: the ability to mentally generate, manipulate, explore, and evaluate hypothetical scenarios, futures, counterfactuals, objects, systems, environments, or states that are not presently given.
The project is less developed than Project Fiction. Its capability boundary, operational tasks, and hypotheses remain unresolved. A broad description of imagination does not yet establish a measurable target for computational reproduction.
Research aim: Understand how humans construct and reason over unreal but coherent possibilities, and determine whether this capability can be replicated in AI models. The migration handover (not included in this public selection: ../../docs/handovers/2026-10-06-migration-handover.txt) retains this working framing; it does not report new Imagination findings.
Current priority
Sharpen the definition and distinguish the target from prediction, simulation, planning, creativity, and Project Fiction. Identify tasks that test deliberate construction and manipulation rather than assuming any generated hypothetical description demonstrates the capability.
No adopted methodology, dataset, experiment run, model architecture, evaluation, or finding is recorded in the current repository.
Research records
- Research question: working formulation and boundaries.
- Hypotheses (not included in this public selection: hypotheses.md): no adopted hypotheses yet.
- Methodology: questions that precede protocol selection.
- Research status: current maturity, assumptions, and priorities.
Use theory/, literature/, datasets/, experiments/, evaluations/, models/, and results/ as artifacts develop. Preserve superseded formulations in archive/; record substantive changes in the research log (not included in this public selection: ../../logs/research-log.md) and experiments in the registry.
Possible relationships with Project Fiction and Project Daydream remain open. A shared representational mechanism, if proposed, must not erase differences in task, intention, or evaluation.
October 14 program context
Hermes' current thesis (not included in this public selection: ../../lab/mission.md) places this exploratory program in a study of possible minds. The method requires functional possible-world construction beyond imaginative prose. Possible interaction with Affect remains a hypothesis. Existing second priority and unresolved measurement/implementation state remain.