what's novelty?

Our paper “Defining and simulating open-ended novelty: requirements, guidelines, and challenges” has just been published in Theory in Biosciences.

abstract:
The open-endedness of a system is often defined as a continual production of novelty. Here we pin down this concept more fully by defining several types of novelty that a system may exhibit, classified as variation, innovation, and emergence. We then provide a meta-model for including levels of structure in a system’s model. From there, we define an architecture suitable for building simulations of open-ended novelty-generating systems and discuss how previously proposed systems fit into this framework. We discuss the design principles applicable to those systems and close with some challenges for the community.

A full-text view-only version of the paper is available from the publisher.