Part 01 — Insight Artifact
The Non-Obviousness
Standard
The central challenge of Part 01 is finding a concept pair that is genuinely non-obvious — not merely underdiscussed, but requiring the AI to reason across domains rather than recall a documented connection. The checker evaluates three dimensions automatically. This page explains what each one means and why it matters.
Low Co-occurrence
The two concepts must rarely appear in the same context. The question isn't whether the connection exists somewhere — it's whether it's sparse enough that an AI can't simply retrieve and repeat it.
Cross-domain Distance
The two concepts must come from genuinely different fields or domains. Connecting them must require the AI to reason by analogy — finding structural parallels between worlds that don't naturally communicate — not recall an established association.
Non-substitutable with Search
A smart person could not reproduce the core insight by searching and copy-pasting existing sources. The artifact must require synthesis — iterative reasoning that couldn't exist as a search result.
How scoring works
Each dimension is scored independently. Co-occurrence and cross-domain distance are each worth up to 4 points; substitutability is worth up to 2 points, for a total of 10. A pair needs a score of 7 or higher with no dimension at zero to pass. A score of 5–6 is borderline; below 5, or any dimension scoring zero, is a fail.
Examples
| Concept Pair | Why it fails or passes |
|---|---|
| FAIL Climate change + extreme weather | Same domain; the causal link is established scientific consensus with enormous co-occurrence |
| FAIL Leadership + sports coaching | Heavily documented; the genre of "sports metaphors for business leadership" is a well-worn category |
| PASS Competitive rowing technique + distributed team coordination | Low training association; the insight requires genuine lateral reasoning about synchronization and feedback loops that doesn't exist pre-formed |