Citation and rights

The canonical creator is firefly, represented as a pseudonymous organizational creator. The publisher and series are Hoxy Papers. This release candidate is version 0.1.0 — Public review, dated 2026-07-22. It has no DOI.

Suggested citation:

firefly. What Makes Search Stay Open? An executable audit of Picbreeder with vision-language models. Hoxy Papers, version 0.1.0, published 2026-07-22. https://papers.hoxy.dev/open-endedness/

Machine-readable formats are generated from the same canonical record:

• plain-text citation

• BibTeX

• RIS

• Citation File Format

• citation JSON

• ScholarlyArticle JSON-LD

• rights manifest

Scope of the license

From public version 0.1.0 onward, prose authored for this publication and original publication figures are offered under CC BY 4.0 and attributed to firefly.

That statement does not relicense the whole deployment. Private repositories and build definitions are not publicly licensed. Starmd, Starimo, Stardust, StarHTML, and shipped runtime code remain proprietary unless separately licensed. Dataset-derived compact evidence remains under CC BY-NC 4.0. The upstream paper remains under its own CC BY 4.0 grant. Third-party papers, media, fonts, and dependencies retain their respective licenses.

Upstream paper

This exploration is based on Sam Earle, Kai Arulkumaran, Andrew Dai, Akarsh Kumar, Julian Togelius, and Sebastian Risi, In Search of the Ingredients of Open-Endedness: Replicating Picbreeder with Large Vision-Language Models, arXiv:2605.23908v2 (2026), CC BY 4.0.