adjacent possible air traffic complex network complexity complex_networks complex_systems creativity cuskley data_compression dynamical_systems evolutionary_dynamics gravino information_theory innovation_dynamics kreyon language_dynamics language_games local optimization loreto monechi opinion_dynamics phylogeny relevant_literature servedio social_dynamics statistical_physics techno_social_systems tria XTribe zippers
2016 |
V Loreto VDP Servedio, SH Strogatz Tria Dynamics on Expanding Spaces: Modeling the Emergence of Novelties (Book Chapter) Mirko Degli Esposti Eduardo G. Altmann, François Pachet (Ed.): Creativity and Universality in Language, pp. 59-83, Springer International Publishing, 2016, ISBN: 978-3-319-24401-3. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: adjacent possible, innovation_dynamics, kreyon, loreto, review, servedio, strogatz, tria) @inbook{Loreto2016, title = {Dynamics on Expanding Spaces: Modeling the Emergence of Novelties}, author = {V Loreto, VDP Servedio, SH Strogatz, F Tria}, editor = {Mirko Degli Esposti, Eduardo G. Altmann, François Pachet}, url = {http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-24403-7_5}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-24403-7_5}, isbn = {978-3-319-24401-3}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-05-19}, booktitle = {Creativity and Universality in Language}, pages = {59-83}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, series = {Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis}, abstract = {Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, and experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individual, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process, come up with something that is not only new to us, but to our entire society so that what is a personal novelty can turn into an innovation at a global level. Innovations occur throughout social, biological, and technological systems and, though we perceive them as a very natural ingredient of our human experience, little is known about the processes determining their emergence. Still the statistical occurrence of innovations shows striking regularities that represent a starting point to get a deeper insight in the whole phenomenology. This paper represents a small step in that direction, focusing on reviewing the scientific attempts to effectively model the emergence of the new and its regularities, with an emphasis on more recent contributions: from the plain Simon’s model tracing back to the 1950s, to the newest model of Polya’s urn with triggering of one novelty by another. What seems to be key in the successful modeling schemes proposed so far is the idea of looking at evolution as a path in a complex space, physical, conceptual, biological, and technological, whose structure and topology get continuously reshaped and expanded by the occurrence of the new. Mathematically, it is very interesting to look at the consequences of the interplay between the “actual” and the “possible” and this is the aim of this short review.}, keywords = {adjacent possible, innovation_dynamics, kreyon, loreto, review, servedio, strogatz, tria}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inbook} } Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, and experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individual, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process, come up with something that is not only new to us, but to our entire society so that what is a personal novelty can turn into an innovation at a global level. Innovations occur throughout social, biological, and technological systems and, though we perceive them as a very natural ingredient of our human experience, little is known about the processes determining their emergence. Still the statistical occurrence of innovations shows striking regularities that represent a starting point to get a deeper insight in the whole phenomenology. This paper represents a small step in that direction, focusing on reviewing the scientific attempts to effectively model the emergence of the new and its regularities, with an emphasis on more recent contributions: from the plain Simon’s model tracing back to the 1950s, to the newest model of Polya’s urn with triggering of one novelty by another. What seems to be key in the successful modeling schemes proposed so far is the idea of looking at evolution as a path in a complex space, physical, conceptual, biological, and technological, whose structure and topology get continuously reshaped and expanded by the occurrence of the new. Mathematically, it is very interesting to look at the consequences of the interplay between the “actual” and the “possible” and this is the aim of this short review. |
Gravino, Pietro; Monechi, Bernardo; Servedio, Vito DP; Tria, Francesca; Loreto, Vittorio Crossing the horizon: exploring the adjacent possible in a cultural system (Proceeding) Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Computational Creativity, June 2016, 2016. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: adjacent possible, complex network, creativity, innovation_dynamics, kreyon, movies) @proceedings{Gravino2016, title = {Crossing the horizon: exploring the adjacent possible in a cultural system}, author = {Pietro Gravino and Bernardo Monechi and Vito DP Servedio and Francesca Tria and Vittorio Loreto}, url = {http://www.computationalcreativity.net/iccc2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Crossing-the-horizon.pdf}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-03-05}, journal = {submitted to "ICCC 2016 - The Seventh International Conference on Computational Creativity"}, publisher = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Computational Creativity, June 2016}, abstract = {It is common opinion that many innovations are triggered by serendipity whose notion is associated with fortuitous events leading to unintended consequences. One might argue that this interpretation is due to the poor understanding of the dynamics of innovations. Very little is known, in fact, about how innovations proceed and samples the space of potential novelties. This space is usually referred to as the adjacent possible, a concept originally introduced in the study of biological systems to indicate the set of possibilities that are one step away from what actually exists. In this paper we focus on the problem of defining the adjacent possible space, and analyzing its dynamics, for a particular system, namely the cultural system of the network of movies. We synthesized to this end the graph emerging from the Internet Movies Database (IMDb) and looked at the static and dynamical properties of this network. We deal, in particular, with the subtle mechanism of the adjacent possible by measuring the expansion and the coverage of this elusive space during the global evolution of the system. Finally, we introduce the concept of adjacent possibilities at the level of single node and try to elucidate its nature by looking at the correlations with topological and user annotation metrics.}, keywords = {adjacent possible, complex network, creativity, innovation_dynamics, kreyon, movies}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {proceedings} } It is common opinion that many innovations are triggered by serendipity whose notion is associated with fortuitous events leading to unintended consequences. One might argue that this interpretation is due to the poor understanding of the dynamics of innovations. Very little is known, in fact, about how innovations proceed and samples the space of potential novelties. This space is usually referred to as the adjacent possible, a concept originally introduced in the study of biological systems to indicate the set of possibilities that are one step away from what actually exists. In this paper we focus on the problem of defining the adjacent possible space, and analyzing its dynamics, for a particular system, namely the cultural system of the network of movies. We synthesized to this end the graph emerging from the Internet Movies Database (IMDb) and looked at the static and dynamical properties of this network. We deal, in particular, with the subtle mechanism of the adjacent possible by measuring the expansion and the coverage of this elusive space during the global evolution of the system. Finally, we introduce the concept of adjacent possibilities at the level of single node and try to elucidate its nature by looking at the correlations with topological and user annotation metrics. |
2015 |
Rodi, Giovanna Chiara; Loreto, Vittorio; Servedio, Vito DP; Tria, Francesca Optimal Learning Paths in Information Networks (Journal Article) Scientific Reports, 5 (10286), 2015. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: innovation_dynamics, kreyon, learning_dynamics, loreto, rodi, servedio, tria) @article{Rodi2015, title = {Optimal Learning Paths in Information Networks}, author = {Giovanna Chiara Rodi and Vittorio Loreto and Vito DP Servedio and Francesca Tria}, url = {http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150601/srep10286/full/srep10286.html}, doi = {10.1038/srep10286}, year = {2015}, date = {2015-06-01}, journal = {Scientific Reports}, volume = {5}, number = {10286}, abstract = {Each sphere of knowledge and information could be depicted as a complex mesh of correlated items. By properly exploiting these connections, innovative and more efficient navigation strategies could be defined, possibly leading to a faster learning process and an enduring retention of information. In this work we investigate how the topological structure embedding the items to be learned can affect the efficiency of the learning dynamics. To this end we introduce a general class of algorithms that simulate the exploration of knowledge/information networks standing on well-established findings on educational scheduling, namely the spacing and lag effects. While constructing their learning schedules, individuals move along connections, periodically revisiting some concepts, and sometimes jumping on very distant ones. In order to investigate the effect of networked information structures on the proposed learning dynamics we focused both on synthetic and real-world graphs such as subsections of Wikipedia and word-association graphs. We highlight the existence of optimal topological structures for the simulated learning dynamics whose efficiency is affected by the balance between hubs and the least connected items. Interestingly, the real-world graphs we considered lead naturally to almost optimal learning performances.}, keywords = {innovation_dynamics, kreyon, learning_dynamics, loreto, rodi, servedio, tria}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {article} } Each sphere of knowledge and information could be depicted as a complex mesh of correlated items. By properly exploiting these connections, innovative and more efficient navigation strategies could be defined, possibly leading to a faster learning process and an enduring retention of information. In this work we investigate how the topological structure embedding the items to be learned can affect the efficiency of the learning dynamics. To this end we introduce a general class of algorithms that simulate the exploration of knowledge/information networks standing on well-established findings on educational scheduling, namely the spacing and lag effects. While constructing their learning schedules, individuals move along connections, periodically revisiting some concepts, and sometimes jumping on very distant ones. In order to investigate the effect of networked information structures on the proposed learning dynamics we focused both on synthetic and real-world graphs such as subsections of Wikipedia and word-association graphs. We highlight the existence of optimal topological structures for the simulated learning dynamics whose efficiency is affected by the balance between hubs and the least connected items. Interestingly, the real-world graphs we considered lead naturally to almost optimal learning performances. |
2014 |
Tria, Francesca; Loreto, Vittorio; Servedio, Vito Domenico Pietro; Strogatz, Steven The dynamics of correlated novelties (Journal Article) Nature Scientific Reports, 4 (5890), 2014. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: creativity, innovation, innovation_dynamics, kreyon, loreto, novelties, servedio, tria) @article{b, title = {The dynamics of correlated novelties}, author = {Francesca Tria and Vittorio Loreto and Vito Domenico Pietro Servedio and Steven H. Strogatz}, url = {http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140731/srep05890/full/srep05890.html}, year = {2014}, date = {2014-01-01}, journal = {Nature Scientific Reports}, volume = {4}, number = {5890}, publisher = {Nature Publishing Group}, 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.}, keywords = {creativity, innovation, innovation_dynamics, kreyon, loreto, novelties, servedio, tria}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {article} } 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. |