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Stepping stones in possibility space - by Gordon Brander

Stepping stones in possibility space - by Gordon Brander

Section titled “Stepping stones in possibility space - by Gordon Brander”

Stepping stones in possibility space

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  • If you try to navigate this maze by the warmer-colder method, you’re going to move toward the objective, and get stuck against the first wall. Every other direction will look worse, because it will take you further away from your objective. Paradoxically, you must be ready to repeatedly walk away from your objective if you are to have any chance of reaching it.

    The idea that an improving score guarantees that you’re approaching the objective is wrong. It’s perfectly possible that moving closer to the goal actually does not increase the value of the objective function, even if the move brings us closer to the objective. (Stanley, Lehman, 2015. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned)

  • Objectives actually become obstacles toward more exciting achievements, like those involving discovery, creativity, invention, or innovation… In other words (and here is the paradox), the greatest achievements become less likely when they are made objectives. (Stanley, Lehman, 2015. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned)
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  • The stepping stones closest to the shore fade gradually as they wind into the fog. As you walk along the course of stepping stones over the water, the shore dissolves from sight behind you even as the other side remains cloaked behind the mist. But here’s the hard part: eventually you come upon a fork where a choice must be made. Because of the fog, you don’t know where either path leads. For all you know, one might lead you to a dead end while the other eventually might reach the other side of the lake. But even if you make a lucky choice, chances are that more forks will appear sooner or later. When crossing stepping stones in a fog, many critical decisions must be made with little knowledge of where they lead. (Stanley, Lehman, 2015. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, ch 4.)
  • Because eventually you have to acquire some kind of knowledge to continue to produce novelty, it means that novelty search is a kind of information accumulator about the world in which it takes place. The longer the search progresses, the more information about the world it ends up accumulating. And of course information and complexity go hand in hand—more complex behaviors require more information. (Stanley, Lehman, 2015. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned)
  • And stepping stones are combinatorial. Each new stepping stone we discover expands our potential to find even more stepping stones. Collecting stepping stones is a luck maximization algorithm. By collecting and combining stepping stones, we might arrive at our destination by accident, or somewhere more interesting!