Related papers: A Quest for Knowledge
Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet, in practice prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, knowledge of how…
Technological knowledge evolves not only through the generation of new ideas, but also through the reinterpretation of existing ones. Reinterpretations lead to changes in the classification of knowledge, that is, reclassification. This…
Studying how we explore the world in search of novelties is key to understand the mechanisms that can lead to new discoveries. Previous studies analyzed novelties in various exploration processes, defining them as the first appearance of an…
We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…
Machine learning-based design has gained traction in the sciences, most notably in the design of small molecules, materials, and proteins, with societal implications spanning drug development and manufacturing, plastic degradation, and…
Scientific progress depends on novel ideas, but current reward systems often fail to recognize them. Many existing metrics conflate novelty with popularity, privileging ideas that fit existing paradigms over those that challenge them. This…
When introducing a novel product, a seller sets a price and decides how much information to provide to a buyer, who may incur a search cost to discover an outside option. The buyer knows the outside option distribution; the seller knows…
One new thing often leads to another. Such correlated novelties are a familiar part of daily life. They are also thought to be fundamental to the evolution of biological systems, human society, and technology. By opening new possibilities,…
In this paper, we examine how patterns of scientific collaboration contribute to knowledge creation. Recent studies have shown that scientists can benefit from their position within collaborative networks by being able to receive more…
How does our society appreciate the uniqueness of cultural products? This fundamental puzzle has intrigued scholars in many fields, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, and marketing. It has been theorized that cultural products…
To provide an explanation of the evolution of scientific knowledge, I start from the assumption that knowledge is based on concepts, and propose that each concept about reality is affected by vagueness. This entails a paradox, which I term…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
Novel scientific knowledge is constantly produced by the scientific community. Understanding the level of novelty characterized by scientific literature is key for modeling scientific dynamics and analyzing the growth mechanisms of…
People make strategic decisions many times a day - during negotiations, when coordinating actions with others, or when choosing partners for cooperation. The resulting dynamics can be studied with learning theory and evolutionary game…
Exploring new ideas is a fundamental aspect of research and development (R\&D), which often occurs in competitive environments. Most ideas are subsequent, i.e. one idea today leads to more ideas tomorrow. According to one approach, the best…
Cultural evolution allows ideas and technologies to accumulate across generations, reaching their most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that…
Most modern systems strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We initiate a study of the interplay between exploration and…
We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the…
Scientific research's mandate is to comprehend and explore the world, as well as to improve it based on experience and knowledge. Knowledge embedding and knowledge discovery are two significant methods of integrating knowledge and data.…
A principal and an agent face symmetric uncertainty about the value of two correlated projects for the agent. The principal chooses which project values to publicly discover and makes a proposal to the agent, who accepts if and only if the…