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Wonder Constant Labs
Research
Project PrismIn development

Decomposing complex systems into parts that can be understood

Our first initiative. Prism studies decomposition itself: when a system is too complex to model whole, which way of splitting it preserves the behaviour you were trying to explain?

Research question

When a system is too complex to model as a whole, which decompositions preserve what actually matters — and how would you know before committing to one?

Overview

Most interesting systems resist being modelled all at once. The usual response is to break them into parts. But a decomposition is a choice, and a bad choice quietly discards the behaviour that made the system worth studying — usually without announcing that it has done so.

Prism treats the decomposition as the object of study rather than a preliminary step. Given a system and a question, we ask which way of splitting it keeps the answer intact: which components can be understood in isolation, which interactions cannot be separated without distortion, and how to tell the difference before a model is built on top of the choice.

The name is literal. A prism separates light into components you can measure individually, and the separation is lossless — the parts recombine into what you started with. Most decompositions of real systems are not like that. Prism is an attempt to measure how far from that ideal a given decomposition falls.

It is a representative first initiative for Wonder Constant Labs for a plain reason: nearly every question the Lab expects to take on will begin by dividing a system too large to hold whole, and the division is where the behaviour under investigation is most easily destroyed without anyone noticing.

Approach

  • Start from synthetic systems with known structure, where a correct decomposition can be checked against ground truth, before touching systems where it cannot.
  • Score decompositions by reconstruction: how faithfully the reassembled parts reproduce the whole, and how much uncertainty each choice introduces.
  • Build tooling so a decomposition can be stated, executed, and audited as an artefact — rather than assumed inside someone's analysis script.
  • Report the cases where the approach fails as prominently as the cases where it works.

Instruments

  • Decomposition harness

    In progress

    An internal harness for declaring a candidate decomposition, running it against a system, and recording the result with its provenance. Early and internal-only.

  • Synthetic system generator

    In progress

    Generates systems with a known component structure and controllable interaction strength, so a decomposition can be scored against ground truth.

Data

  • Synthetic reference set

    In progress

    A growing collection of generated systems with recorded structure. Not yet stable enough to publish, and not yet large enough to be interesting.

Models

  • Reconstruction error estimator

    Planned

    An estimator for how much of a system's behaviour survives a given decomposition, with an interval rather than a point value.

Log

  1. March 1, 2026 · Initiative opened

    Scope defined around decomposition as the primary question rather than as a preliminary step. Problem selection and reading underway.

  2. May 19, 2026 · Harness scaffold

    First internal utilities for declaring and evaluating candidate decompositions against generated systems.

  3. July 6, 2026 · Ground-truth generator

    Synthetic system generator produces systems with known component structure, so reconstruction can be scored rather than argued about.

Known limitations

Stated before anyone has to ask.

  • Everything measured so far has been measured on systems we generated ourselves. Results on synthetic systems say very little about real ones.
  • The scoring approach assumes the question being asked of the system is fixed. A decomposition that is right for one question is often wrong for another, and we do not yet handle that.
  • No external review. Nobody outside the company has checked any of this.

Findings to date

No results published. Prism is in development; the work to date is problem framing and instrumentation. When there is something to report, it will appear here with its methods and its uncertainty attached.