// manuscripts & preprints
Submitted — Jun 2026
The Art of Art: A Strategic Treatise on Human Creativity and Generative AI
Justin A. Fritz — The Canonical Art LLC — 2026
Proposed to Leonardo (MIT Press), CFP “From Cybernetics to Co-Creation”
Develops a dynamical systems framework for distinguishing AI-assisted from AI-generated creative and intellectual work. Grounded in four hand-drawn conceptual diagrams produced 2022–2023, prior to the public availability of large-scale generative AI, and in the author’s experience as a hardware engineer whose AI-assisted papers have been challenged on provenance grounds.

Four propositions: (I) human creative cognition is a knowledge state machine Kt+1 = f(Kt, θt, εt) whose trajectory constitutes authorship; (II) economic value of intellectual work derives from the rate of change of the knowledge field it induces, not static output quality; (III) generative AI is a derived state-space transformer without an independent knowledge trajectory; (IV) current AI provenance evaluation measures distributional proximity to training data — the wrong metric for the right question. The synthesis reconnects to Wiener’s cybernetics trilogy (1948–1964).
Preprint — 2026
The Read-Modify-Write Wall: A Unified Cost Model for Die-to-Die Memory in AI/HPC Algorithm Design
Justin A. Fritz — The Canonical Art LLC — 2026
arXiv cs.AR preprint
Presents a four-dimension cost model for HBM die-to-die interfaces: bandwidth efficiency, access latency, energy per operation, and area-normalized throughput. All parameters grounded in JEDEC JESD235C (HBM2e) and JESD270-4A (HBM4) timing specifications.

Central finding: graph traversal and LLM inference achieve only 34–53% bandwidth efficiency on HBM4 at 8 Gb/s. The bottleneck is tRRD — the row-to-row activation delay — not the data bus rate. HBM4’s higher data rate paradoxically reduces random-access efficiency relative to HBM2e. Standards contribution: halving tRRD,S from 4 to 2 cycles in the HBM5 JEDEC JC-42 specification delivers +37% effective bandwidth to graph workloads and +21% to LLM inference.
Preprint — 2026
BFS-HBM: Open-Source RTL for Deterministic k-Hop Graph Traversal on High-Bandwidth Memory
Justin A. Fritz — The Canonical Art LLC — 2026
arXiv cs.AR preprint
Synthesizable SystemVerilog microarchitecture for BFS traversal of CSR-encoded sparse graphs stored in HBM. 12-state AXI4 traversal FSM, 2-cycle BRAM read-modify-write visited bitmap, FIFO-based frontier queue. Single-beat row-pointer fetch eliminates a second HBM round trip per vertex.

Cycle-accurate simulation at 250 MHz with 20-cycle modeled HBM latency confirms correct BFS ordering for all vertices in 514 cycles. Throughput model converges to η ≈ 40% at realistic graph degrees, consistent with the companion HBM timing analysis. FPGA bring-up path documented for Xilinx Alveo U280; ASIC target TSMC N7 / GlobalFoundries 12LP. MIT license.
Preprint — Jun 2026
Trivia as Incoherent Measurement: Designing Knowledge Assessments Under Expert Uncertainty
Justin A. Fritz — The Canonical Art LLC — 2026
Companion to the TCA Trilogy · Nerd Nite Fort Collins
Formalizes live-show trivia design as a sparse knowledge measurement problem using the incoherence condition from compressive sensing. Each question is a binary measurement of an audience member’s knowledge state; the three-tier difficulty system (Accessible / Nerdy / Deep Cut) forms an incoherent measurement basis spanning the audience knowledge distribution. Logarithmic scoring p(d) = 100 × 3d−1 maximizes score variance and ensures leaderboard separation by domain expertise, not general quiz performance.

Addresses the non-expert rubric problem via an LLM-assisted protocol: the Boss drafts questions from compressed talk summaries, the LLM elaborates within its training distribution (Accessible / Nerdy), and the speaker verifies Deep Cut questions as local Oracle. Grounded in the deployed Nerdometer system at Nerd Nite Fort Collins. Cites R. Baraniuk’s compressive sensing group at Rice University.
// tca trilogy — in progress

Three connected papers developing a unified framework for authorship, knowledge, and measurement in the age of generative AI. Each paper is a standalone argument; together they form a single claim.

I — The Art of Art  —  Human creative cognition as a K-trajectory. Authorship is the sequence of knowledge states, not the output. Generative AI has no trajectory. ↓ PDF
II — The Heat Death of the Internet  —  AI-generated content is plausibility-correlated noise. As synthetic content fraction grows, mutual information between a query and the truth approaches zero. ↓ PDF
III — The Oracle Metric  —  All finite systems are far from complete knowledge. AI benchmarks and citation counts measure distributional proximity, not epistemic completeness. ↓ PDF

Full source at github.com/quantumcelnav/tca-trilogy. Papers IV–V in development: K-trajectory authentication via PUF cryptography; The Canonical Theory of Computation.

// talks & outreach
Jun 2025
Nerd Nite Fort Collins S25E6 · Wolverine Farm
Used an AI model of Norbert Wiener to diagram modern AI technology and make predictions about its future. Live instance of the two-operator model formalized in The Art of Art: author’s K-trajectory (cybernetics, AI systems, social consequences) directing an AI to instantiate Wiener’s perspective.