---
title: "Ideonomy"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonomy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:39:29.838500+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Edward Fredkin, former director of MIT's computer science laboratory, who praised Gunkel's "provocative ideas on artificial intelligence."
Marvin Minsky, AI scientist and MIT professor, who described ideonomy as "perhaps the most extensive study of ways to generate ideas."
Frederick Seitz, president emeritus of Rockefeller University, who noted Gunkel's "encyclopedic scope"
Robert C. Clark, Harvard law professor, who called Gunkel "the most intelligent person I ever met" 
However, skeptics questioned whether ideonomy constituted a genuine science. Fredkin himself noted that Gunkel "pours out about 60 ideas a minute, and 59 of them are bad," though he added that "even with one good idea out of 60, it's still an amazing accomplishment." Douglas Lenat observed that brainstorming with Gunkel was "a bit like being hit over the head by the muse with a sledgehammer" and that "he puts people off."
Gunkel himself acknowledged that ideonomy was in its infancy and might seem "absurdly utopian."  His planned magnum opus on ideonomy remained incomplete, and was posted on an MIT website thanks to faculty advisor Whitman Richards. Gunkel wrote: "Pioneering in a completely new field, yes in a new science, is almost unreal. It is heartbreaking, it is pitiable, it is almost inhuman. Honestly, it is a hell. There is nothing heroic about it." 

== Related concepts ==
Gunkel identified several historical precedents for ideonomic thinking:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716): The philosopher's work on a universal characteristic (characteristica universalis) and calculus of reasoning
Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869): Creator of Roget's Thesaurus, which organized concepts into a systematic taxonomy
Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907): Developer of the periodic table, demonstrating how combining lists of element families could reveal previously unseen connections
Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974): The Caltech astrophysicist whom Gunkel called the "grandfather of ideonomy" for his development of "morphological research"—systematic exploration of all possible solutions to problems
Ideonomy is also related to but distinct from "ideology" in its original sense. When Antoine Destutt de Tracy coined "ideology" in 1796, he intended it as a rigorous science dealing with the systematic analysis of ideas and their origins. This original meaning was later supplanted by the modern political connotation.
Notably, the combinatorial discovery process Gunkel identified as central to ideonomy is in use today by inventors who task AI with running through cross-domain permutations until a novel combination (e.g., between shapes and device types) is discovered with potential applied value. These scientists appear to think of novel matches surfaced by the AI as "hallucinations."
Other academic work in computational creativity has recognized the applied value of combinatorial methods without identifying ideonomy by name. For example, a 2023 paper in Leonardo presents the results of a deep learning neural network experiment that identified optimized configurations based on user preferences. The authors state: "This methodology is projected to have many applications in fashion, architecture, music, storytelling, cooking, or any other design or art field that can be represented as a set of permutations." This is precisely the way Gunkel saw a science of ideas working, as the methodology for ideonomy is not applicable to a single discipline, but treats any discipline that uses parameter spaces as discovery mechanisms. For example, a May 2022 workshop at Akademie Schloss Solitude called "Modifying Food Texture," presented by Agnes Cameron and Gary Zhexi Zhang, used ideonomy to explore novel industrial food texture modification techniques.

== Legacy ==
Gunkel died in 2017, leaving ideonomy without its primary developer. Although citations and use cases for ideonomy continue to appear in literature, the field has not yet achieved the institutional recognition or widespread adoption that Gunkel originally envisioned.
When questioned about the utility of ideonomy, Gunkel invoked Benjamin Franklin's response when asked about the usefulness of electricity immediately after its invention: "What use is a newborn baby?" Gunkel suggested that ideonomy, like other nascent sciences, required time to demonstrate its potential.

== See also ==
Artificial Intelligence
Combinatorics
Computational creativity
Epistemology
Idea
Ideology
Morphological analysis
Systems theory
TRIZ

== References ==

== External links ==
MIT's Ideonomy website - Original website created for ideonomy (static since 2006)
The Gunkel Global Renaissance Project - 501(c)(3) created to advance Gunkel's legacy and ideas