Innovation and cumulative culture through tweaks and leaps in online programming contests

E.M. was supported by the John Templeton Foundation Grant #40128 ‘Exploring the Evolutionary Foundations of Cultural Complexity, Creativity, and Trust’ and the University of St Andrews School of Biology. L.R. was supported by the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland (MASTs) pooling initiative funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference HR09011).The ability to build progressively on the achievements of earlier generations is central to human uniqueness, but experimental investigations of this cumulative cultural evolution lack real-world complexity. Here, we studied the dynamics of cumulative culture using a large-scale data set from online collaborative programming competitions run over 14 years. We show that, within each contest population, performance increases over time through frequent ‘tweaks’ of the current best entry and rare innovative ‘leaps’ (successful tweak:leap ratio = 16:1), the latter associated with substantially greater variance in performance. Cumulative cultural evolution reduces technological diversity over time, as populations focus on refining high-performance solutions. While individual entries borrow from few sources, iterative copying allows populations to integrate ideas from many sources, demonstrating a new form of collective intelligence. Our results imply that maximising technological progress requires accepting high levels of failure.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Flexible learning, rather than inveterate innovation or copying, drives cumulative knowledge gain

E.M. was supported by John Templeton Foundation Grant #40128 “Exploring the Evolutionary Foundations of Cultural Complexity, Creativity, and Trust” and the University of St Andrews School of Biology. L.R. was supported by the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland (MASTs) pooling initiative funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference HR09011).Human technology is characterized by cumulative cultural knowledge gain, yet researchers have limited knowledge of the mix of copying and innovation that maximizes progress. Here, we analyze a unique large-scale dataset originating from collaborative online programming competitions to investigate, in a setting of real-world complexity, how individual differences in innovation, social-information use, and performance generate technological progress. We find that cumulative knowledge gain is primarily driven by pragmatists, willing to copy, innovate, explore, and take risks flexibly, rather than by pure innovators or habitual copiers. Our study also reveals a key role for prestige in information transfer.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe