title: The dynamics of correlated novelties.
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.
authors: Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Via Alassio 11C, 10126 Torino, Italy.
authors: F
authors: F
authors: Tria
authors: 1] Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Via Alassio 11C, 10126 Torino, Italy [2] Sapienza University of Rome, Physics Dept., Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy.
authors: V
authors: V
authors: Loreto
authors: 1] Sapienza University of Rome, Physics Dept., Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy [2] Institute for Complex Systems (ISC-CNR), Via dei Taurini 19, 00185 Roma, Italy.
authors: V D P
authors: VD
authors: Servedio
authors: Cornell University, Dept. of Mathematics, 310 Malott Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
authors: S H
authors: SH
authors: Strogatz
mesh_terms: D019277:Entropy; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009146:Music; D011336:Probability