// 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.