Related papers: A Quest for Knowledge
Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However, science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the mind of…
Scientific prizes are among the greatest recognition a scientist receives from their peers and arguably shape the direction of a field by conferring credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, providing financial rewards, and promoting…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
Curiosity is a vital metacognitive skill in educational contexts, leading to creativity, and a love of learning. And while many school systems increasingly undercut curiosity by teaching to the test, teachers are increasingly interested in…
This paper outlines a framework for the study of innovation that treats discoveries as additions to evolving networks. As inventions enter they expand or limit the reach of the ideas they build on by influencing how successive discoveries…
Information accounting provides a better foundation for hypothesis testing than does uncertainty quantification. A quantitative account of science is derived under this perspective that alleviates the need for epistemic bridge principles,…
One of the main motivations for the use of competitive coevolution systems is their ability to capitalise on arms races between competing species to evolve increasingly sophisticated solutions. Such arms races can, however, be hard to…
National science systems have become embedded in global science and countries do everything they can to harness global knowledge to national economic needs. However, accessing and using the riches of global knowledge can occur only through…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
In an information-rich world, people's time and attention must be divided among rapidly changing information sources and the diverse tasks demanded of them. How people decide which of the many sources, such as scientific articles or…
We investigate the use of attentional neural network layers in order to learn a `behavior characterization' which can be used to drive novelty search and curiosity-based policies. The space is structured towards answering a particular…
Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…
Doing research is fighting, what any other thing the human being could do? Fight against powers or to get powers, that depends on us. Science can be a revolution or deadlocked idleness. Still waters, without hitting the stones along their…
With the rapid development of recommender systems, accuracy is no longer the only golden criterion for evaluating whether the recommendation results are satisfying or not. In recent years, diversity has gained tremendous attention in…
In business, politics and life, folk wisdom encourages people to aim for above-average results, but to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here, we mathematically formalize and extend this folk wisdom. We model a time-limited…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
The human intrinsic desire to pursue knowledge, also known as curiosity, is considered essential in the process of skill acquisition. With the aid of artificial curiosity, we could equip current techniques for control, such as Reinforcement…
Science is essential to innovation and economic prosperity. Although studies have shown that national scientific development is affected by geographic, historic, and economic factors, it remains unclear whether there are universal…
We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…
In environments with sparse rewards, finding a good inductive bias for exploration is crucial to the agent's success. However, there are two competing goals: novelty search and systematic exploration. While existing approaches such as…