Discovering new ideas by playing the Aphors Game has been limited to using ideas condensed into single sentences. The game is to clash them and generate new ideas, but on reviewing what I’ve said to friends when trying to explain the concept, it became apparent that my examples had been physical, not verbal. The typical example was the evident need for wheels on suitcases, but no one invented that device until recently. If someone had suggested it a hundred years ago, suitcases would have had wheels for ninety-nine years.

Therefore, the Aphor concept should be expanded from sentences about ideas to include statements about physical objects. For example, the categories for things similar to a wheel could be listed, like roller, disk, hoop, pulley, cogwheel, rowel, caster, drum, skid, slide, a sheet of balls between surfaces, ball bearing, axle, etc. These physical things could randomly clash with any of the existing Aphor idea sentences or with any other general physical category. Things like device, implement, gadget, substance, contrivance could have clashed with any thing or class of thing. Even specific natural essences like a man, or tree, mountain, ice patch, atom, or complex human items like car, airplane, house, shoe, shirt, computer, TV, smartphone, web, Google could have productively clashed. This method is an example of creating a punctuated equilibrium of ideas.

The end of the Aphor game is to discover new relationships like wheels on suitcases. We can do this now by clashing a hard-sole shoe with a sheet of ball bearings on a hard surface and make a skating rink. That’s not a great idea, but it does illustrate the point of creating a possible relationship.