Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603366/mathematical-model-reveals-the-patterns-of-how-innovations-arise/

by daralthus • 10 years ago

20 4 10 years ago

jasode• 10 years ago

The adjacent possible is all those things—ideas, words, songs, molecules, genomes, technologies and so on—that are one step away from what actually exists.

The "adjacent possible" concept seems very related to the phenomena of multiple independent discovery:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

38kkdiu• 10 years ago

Damn, thank you for that link. Satisfying to see what's on my mind so much lately on the page.

The article and actual paper being discussed were both fascinating and satisfying to me. Predictably, maybe, the paper is a lot more than the summary article.

To your point, maybe, after skimming the paper, this comment in the Technology Review summary struck me: "Curiously, the same model accounts for both phenomenon. It seems that the pattern behind the way we discover novelties—new songs, books, etc.—is the same as the pattern behind the way innovations emerge from the adjacent possible. That raises some interesting questions, not least of which is why this should be."

It seems to me that at some level, it should be impossible to really know if something is a novelty or innovation, in that what defines an innovation is novelty exhausted over all the possible observers or something. You always have a frame of reference (in this scheme, an urn), and what you observe is novelty. You might infer innovation if an observation (in this scheme, a new color) is new over all the observers (over all the urns). If the observers are sufficient in number and sufficiently diverse, it becomes harder to determine whether the novelty is an innovation or not. Their example (as far as I can tell) assumes an urn, and the question of determining a novelty or an innovation is like having numerous urns, and estimating whether or not a new color is just new to that urn, or new to all the urns, including urns that haven't been examined.

The paper itself leads with some discussion of how this problem relates to statistical inference, which I find fascinating. They don't really get into it very much, but it leads to some interesting questions, like how to make inferences when the event/sample space/domain itself is random or unknown. Also relates to information-theory questions involving code alphabets that are unknown or indeterminate (for example, http://www-ee.eng.hawaii.edu/~prasadsn/patterns.pdf).

marcosdumay• 10 years ago

I fail to see how conclusions about diversity of words in text bodies would also apply to innovation at large.

ohdrat• 9 years ago

Adjacent seems like just low-hanging fruit. What about triz-type patterns or silly patterns like lateral thinking that activate dormant attributes?

Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise

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