Foraging
Creative thinking in a broad range of scientific discoveries is similar to food foraging. A food forager uses creative processes when finding the next patch of food. Decisions made for optimal foraging need to take into account the uncertainties and risks
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Foraging
Creative thinking in a broad range of scientific discoveries is similar to food foraging. A food forager uses creative processes when finding the next patch of food. Decisions made for optimal foraging need to take into account the uncertainties and risks of the investment of time, energy, and other resources and the expected gains. If foragers have a vast number of alternatives to consider but only a tiny chance of finding anything useful, then the foragers are alert to scents, signs, and other types of cues to avoid an unproductive search. A scientist, as a forager and creator of new knowledge, faces similar challenges of finding patches of ideas, theories, and evidence in scientific inquires. Since scientific breakthroughs, or transformative discoveries, are truly novel in creating a new way of thinking, these involve the identification of patches of knowledge that are often either remote from the state of the art or non-existent. Notable examples of this include searching for earth-like planets in the Universe, searching for satisfactory compounds in chemical space for drug discovery, or searching for new ideas that may revolutionize a field or lead to the birth of a new field. Optimal foraging theory provides a surprisingly profound foundation for the study of searching for food, information, and ideas. It formulates the nature of such activities as a series of decisions to be made with the intent to maximize the ratio of reward to cost or overhead. The type of rewards could be food for food foragers, information for information searchers, evidence for intelligence analysts, or inspirational ideas for scientists. The type of cost and overhead includes the energy consumed for chasing a pray, time spent on search, and suspicious patterns. The optimal foraging perspective leads to a theory of discovery that consists of generic mechanisms of how creative discoveries are made. Our central hypothesis is that the linking of previously unconnected or loosely connected bodies of knowledge is a profound mechanism of scientific creativity. In addition, we expect that transformative advances are recognizable and detectable in terms of how they alter the existing structure of knowledge.
C. Chen, Turning Points © Higher Education Press, Beijing and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
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Chapter 5
Foraging
5.1 An Information-Theoretic View of Visual Analytics The investigation of 911 terrorist attacks has raised questions on whether the intelligence agencies could have connected the dots and prevented the terrorist attacks (Anderson, Schum, & Twining, 2005). Prior to the September-11 terrorist attacks, several foreign nationals enrolled in different civilian flying schools to learn how to fly large commercial aircraft. They were interested in learning how to navigate civilian airlines, but not in landings or takeoffs. And they all paid cash for their lessons. What is needed for someone to connect these seemingly isolated dots and reveal the hidden story? In an intriguing The New Yorker article, Gladwell differentiated pu
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