Related papers: A Quest for Knowledge
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
This paper introduces a framework to study innovation in a strategic setting, in which innovators allocate their resources between exploration and exploitation in continuous time. Exploration creates public knowledge, while exploitation…
Evolvability is an important feature that impacts the ability of evolutionary processes to find interesting novel solutions and to deal with changing conditions of the problem to solve. The estimation of evolvability is not straightforward…
Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individuals, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process,…
The constantly growing body of scholarly knowledge of science, technology, and humanities is an asset of the mankind. While new discoveries expand the existing knowledge, they may simultaneously render some of it obsolete. It is crucial for…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
Children learn continually by asking questions about the concepts they are most curious about. With robots becoming an integral part of our society, they must also learn unknown concepts continually by asking humans questions. The paper…
We provide a model of investment in innovation that is dynamic, features multiple heterogeneous research projects of which only one potentially leads to success, and in each period, the researcher chooses the set of projects to invest in.…
What are the functions of curiosity? What are the mechanisms of curiosity-driven learning? We approach these questions about the living using concepts and tools from machine learning and developmental robotics. We argue that…
Considering collaborative patent development, we provide micro-level evidence for innovation through exchanges of differentiated knowledge. Knowledge embodied in a patent is proxied by word pairs appearing in its abstract, while novelty is…
Curiosity-based reward schemes can present powerful exploration mechanisms which facilitate the discovery of solutions for complex, sparse or long-horizon tasks. However, as the agent learns to reach previously unexplored spaces and the…
This paper explores the concept of "entropy of knowledge" (EoN) as a framework for understanding the challenges and complexities of scientific discovery. Drawing from principles in thermodynamics and information theory, I propose that the…
Novelty, akin to gene mutation in evolution, opens possibilities for scholarly advancement. Although peer review remains the gold standard for evaluating novelty in scholarly communication and resource allocation, the vast volume of…
People employ their knowledge to recognize things. This paper is concerned with how to measure people's knowledge for recognition and how it changes. The discussion is based on three assumptions. Firstly, we construct two evolution process…
Throughout life, we might seek a calling, companions, skills, entertainment, truth, self-knowledge, beauty, and edification. The practice of curiosity can be viewed as an extended and open-ended search for valuable information with hidden…
Over the last few decades, the nature of scientific research has changed in response to external influences. Firstly, powerful networked computers have become a standard tool. Secondly, society presses ever harder for research to deliver…
Novel class discovery is essential for ML models to adapt to evolving real-world data, with applications ranging from scientific discovery to robotics. However, these datasets contain complex and entangled factors of variation, making a…
A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
We hypothesize that curiosity is a mechanism found by evolution that encourages meaningful exploration early in an agent's life in order to expose it to experiences that enable it to obtain high rewards over the course of its lifetime. We…