# Project Imagination — Research status

Status: exploratory

Updated: 2026-10-06

**Priority:** Second, after Project Fiction.

**Maturity:** Less developed than Project Fiction. Capability definition, tasks, hypotheses, and methodology remain under development.

## Current working position

Investigate deliberate possible-world construction: generating, manipulating, exploring, and evaluating hypothetical scenarios, futures, counterfactuals, objects, systems, environments, or states that are not presently given.

## Assumptions and boundaries under review

The working framing treats deliberate possible-world construction as a candidate research target. Its separability from prediction, simulation, planning, creativity, and Project Fiction remains unestablished. No shared mechanism or model architecture is assumed.

## Work recorded and underway

The supplied framing, repository initialization, and migration handover are recorded. The current aim is to understand human construction and reasoning over unreal but coherent possibilities and investigate computational replication. No adopted hypotheses, protocols, datasets, experimental attempts or runs underway, model implementations, evaluations, or findings are recorded here. Fiction's literature map does not automatically transfer its definitions or methods into this project.

## Near-term priorities

1. Sharpen the capability definition.
2. Distinguish adjacent activities and the other Hermean Projects.
3. Identify measurable tasks and defensible evaluation criteria.
4. Develop research hypotheses.

The highest-priority unresolved question is what would make a task specifically measure deliberate possible-world construction. See [research-question.md](research-question.md); preserve uncertainty as tasks and criteria are proposed.