
Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise - daralthus
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603366/mathematical-model-reveals-the-patterns-of-how-innovations-arise/
======
jasode
_> 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery)

~~~
38kkdiu
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](http://www-
ee.eng.hawaii.edu/~prasadsn/patterns.pdf)).

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

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

