baldassarri baronchelli barrat caglioti castellano cattuto complexity dattoli evolutionary_dynamics granular_media granular_media herrmann information_theory innovation_dynamics kreyon language_dynamics loreto mari mukherjee petri pietronero puglisi quantum_optics self_organization servedio statistical_physics techno_social_systems tria zapperi zippers
2016 |
V Loreto VDP Servedio, SH Strogatz Tria F 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 | Tag: 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. |
Monechi, Bernardo; Ruiz-Serrano, Alvaro; Tria, Francesca; Loreto, Vittorio Waves of Novelties in the Expansion into the Adjacent Possible Journal Article submitted to Scientific Reports, 2016. Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tag: adjacent possible, complex systems, innovation, kreyon, popularity, trends @article{Monechi2016, title = {Waves of Novelties in the Expansion into the Adjacent Possible}, author = {Bernardo Monechi and Alvaro Ruiz-Serrano and Francesca Tria and Vittorio Loreto}, url = {http://www.socialdynamics.it/pubs/}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-03-21}, journal = {submitted to Scientific Reports}, abstract = {The emergence of novelties and their rise and fall in popularity is an ubiquitous phenomenon in human activities. The coexistence of always popular milestones with novel and sometimes ephemeral trends pervades technological, scientific and artistic production. By introducing suitable statistical measures, we demonstrate that different systems of human activities, i.e. the creation of hashtags in Twitter, the interaction with online program code repositories, the creation of texts and the listening of songs on an on-line platform, exhibit surprisingly similar properties. We then introduce a general framework to explain those regularities. We propose a simple mathematical model based on the expansion into the adjacent possible, that has been proven to be a very general and powerful mechanism able to explain many of the statistical patterns emerging in innovation dynamics, to which we add two crucial elements. On the one hand we quantify the idea that, while exploring a conceptual or physical space, inertia exists towards known already discovered elements. On the other hand, we highlight the role of the collective dynamics - where many users interact, in a direct or indirect way in the emergence and diffusion of novelties and innovations.}, keywords = {adjacent possible, complex systems, innovation, kreyon, popularity, trends}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {article} } The emergence of novelties and their rise and fall in popularity is an ubiquitous phenomenon in human activities. The coexistence of always popular milestones with novel and sometimes ephemeral trends pervades technological, scientific and artistic production. By introducing suitable statistical measures, we demonstrate that different systems of human activities, i.e. the creation of hashtags in Twitter, the interaction with online program code repositories, the creation of texts and the listening of songs on an on-line platform, exhibit surprisingly similar properties. We then introduce a general framework to explain those regularities. We propose a simple mathematical model based on the expansion into the adjacent possible, that has been proven to be a very general and powerful mechanism able to explain many of the statistical patterns emerging in innovation dynamics, to which we add two crucial elements. On the one hand we quantify the idea that, while exploring a conceptual or physical space, inertia exists towards known already discovered elements. On the other hand, we highlight the role of the collective dynamics - where many users interact, in a direct or indirect way in the emergence and diffusion of novelties and innovations. |
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 | Tag: 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. |
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