The questions of the science of generation have two sources: the Chinese tradition of generative thought, deducing downward from the way of yin and yang, and twentieth-century mathematical work at the well-founded boundary — the Axiom of Foundation, non-well-founded set theory and coalgebra.
Intellectual sources
Daoism, the study of the Changes and Chinese medicine tend to deduce downward from high-level generative principles; their weakness is that the path to those principles is compressed into intuitive grasp, with no explicit record of data and probabilities. Western empirical science induces upward from low-level observation, so its conclusions are always probabilistic. The two are complementary. Interpretive
Neighbours in Western thought: Whitehead’s process philosophy comes closest but remains a one-way sequence of becoming, without the symmetry mutual arising needs; Aczel’s non-well-founded set theory is the nearest tool at the boundary but still takes being as its operator. Interpretive
Timeline
- Pre-QinThe Book of Changes and the Laozi: the way of yin and yang, and “the Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao” — the Dao cannot be grasped by being.
- 1925–1930Von Neumann and Zermelo bring the Axiom of Foundation into axiomatic set theory, excluding circular membership: the precise boundary of well-founded beings.
- 1964Sharkovskii’s theorem: the ordering of periods implied for continuous maps.
- 1976–1978May’s study of the logistic map and Feigenbaum’s universal constants: period doubling on the road to chaos.
- 1987Paige and Tarjan’s partition refinement algorithm: finite bisimulation becomes efficiently decidable.
- 1988Aczel, Non-Well-Founded Sets: the Anti-Foundation Axiom replaces Foundation with the greatest fixed point.
- 2026LI Xutong’s Science of Generation settles on seven parts; the no-axiom theorem; “entities do not carry their path” raised to a postulate; the Reasoning Research Institute takes its current name.
- 2026-09Third edition of the plan for dissemination and social impact: “concentrated production, distributed verification”; the genealogy of entry problems: start from hard problems, six in the inner ring; The Closed-Loop Era: four levels of closed loops and seven theoretical gaps.
Roadmap
The plan below starts on 28 September 2026. Its success criteria are set in advance, and any change made during execution must be recorded with its reason and published; the exact thresholds await the author’s confirmation.
- 2026-10 to 12Phase 0, cleaning and foundations: review of the claim-base seed; propagation of cumulative corrections; pre-launch checks of the portal; the first Lean formalisation (overcoming = generation²); problem statements for the six inner-ring problems.
- 2027–2028Phase 1, checkable credit and first solution packages: pre-registration and testing of three packages (cell fate, DTEB, software cycles); three batches of Lean formalisation; the English portal and MCP interface; independent verifiers for each problem class.
- 2029–2031Phase 2, verification network and spread of capability: grants for outside researchers; an invitation-only workshop; publication of the full Chinese Science of Generation and of Science of Being; packages for four to six problem classes.
- From 2032Phase 3, unfolding the whole: conditional on the grand unification theorem being completed and reviewed; until then the overall world view is not promoted.
Important corrections
A discipline’s history includes the history of its own corrections. Confirmed corrections in this system include: νF is one appearance of the Dao, not the Dao itself; “relations precede entities” became “relations and entities are generated together”; the two sciences stand in a containment asymmetry, not as symmetric yin-yang halves. The full list is in the editorial policy.