Exploring the adjacent possible: play, anticipation, surprise

Abstract

Novelties frequently occur in our individual daily lives. We meet new people, learn and use new words, listen to new songs, watch a new movie, and adopt new technology. Such unique experiences sometimes happen by chance. Often they are triggered by earlier new experiences, thus providing a compelling correlation between their appearances. Historically the notion of the “new” has always offered challenges to humankind. What is new often defies the natural tendency of humans to predict and control future events. Still, we base most of our decisions on our expectations about the future. From this perspective, a deep understanding of the underlying mechanisms through which novelties emerge and humans anticipate their occurrence is key to progress in all sectors of human activities. The common intuition that one new thing often leads to another is captured, mathematically, by the notion of “adjacent possible”, i.e., the set of all those things (ideas, linguistic structures, concepts, molecules, genomes, technological artefacts, etc.) that are one step away from what actually exists. It hence can arise from incremental modifications and recombination of existing material. In this talk, I’ll present a mathematical framework describing the expansion of the adjacent possible, whose predictions are borne out in several data sets drawn from social and technological systems.