Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

August 12, 2014

The dynamics of correlated novelties

Filed under: Navigation,Novelty — Patrick Durusau @ 4:04 pm

The dynamics of correlated novelties by F. Tria, V. Loreto, V. D. P. Servedio, and S. H. Strogatz.

Abstract:

Novelties are a familiar part of daily life. They are also fundamental to the evolution of biological systems, human society, and technology. By opening new possibilities, one novelty can pave the way for others in a process that Kauffman has called “expanding the adjacent possible”. The dynamics of correlated novelties, however, have yet to be quantified empirically or modeled mathematically. Here we propose a simple mathematical model that mimics the process of exploring a physical, biological, or conceptual space that enlarges whenever a novelty occurs. The model, a generalization of Polya’s urn, predicts statistical laws for the rate at which novelties happen (Heaps’ law) and for the probability distribution on the space explored (Zipf’s law), as well as signatures of the process by which one novelty sets the stage for another. We test these predictions on four data sets of human activity: the edit events of Wikipedia pages, the emergence of tags in annotation systems, the sequence of words in texts, and listening to new songs in online music catalogues. By quantifying the dynamics of correlated novelties, our results provide a starting point for a deeper understanding of the adjacent possible and its role in biological, cultural, and technological evolution.

From the introduction:

The notion that one new thing sometimes triggers another is, of course, commonsensical. But it has never been documented quantitatively, to the best of our knowledge. In the world before the Internet, our encounters with mundane novelties, and the possible correlations between them, rarely left a trace. Now, however, with the availability of extensive longitudinal records of human activity online1, it has become possible to test whether everyday novelties crop up by chance alone, or whether one truly does pave the way for another.

Steve Newcomb often talks about serendipity and topic maps. What if it is possible to engineer serendipity? That is over a large enough population, discover the subjects that are going to trigger the transition where “formerly adjacent possible becomes actualized[?].

This work is in its very early stages but its impact on information delivery/discovery may be substantial.

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