Chapter 5. The Creative Sigmoid

Owing to its combinatory nature, ACASIA outputs an accumulation of innovations, described by the Creative Sigmoid. More and more diverse information leads to bigger creative leaps. Due to the scope of information that can be processed, however, the size of the cumulative steps decreases, describing asymptotic growth. This chapter formalizes ACASIA as a self-similar, partly stochastic process of creative advance, explaining that at all scales S-shaped growth curves start apparently spontaneously out of the top of the previous one. In creative progress, a new field starts with a jump from a previous rather stable situation: Knowledge was growing very slowly if at all, actually the field was stagnating, the totality of knowledge approaching a horizontal asymptote. The jump creates an opportunity for growth which at first stimulates more new ideas and knowledge increases more and more rapidly, but then slowly starts to slow down again, stable growth, finally again stagnating, stuck in its own preconceptions (cf. high culture). At bigger as well as at smaller scales, the same happens but also the process in individual brains can be modeled like this, in research groups, in artistic domains, in all of technology, in all of civilization, i.e. at bigger and bigger aggregation levels. The sudden jumps are triggered by communication of similarity between different components (i.e. seeing unity in diversity).

(Abstract written together with Richard Gill, Nov. 25, 2010)