{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/levy-flights-of-the-collective-imagination","title":"Lévy Flights of the Collective Imagination","arxiv_id":"1812.04013","date":"2018-12-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["William H. W. Thompson","Zachary Wojtowicz","Simon DeDeo"],"abstract":"We present a structured random-walk model that captures key aspects of how\npeople communicate in groups. Our model takes the form of a correlated L\\'{e}vy\nflight that quantifies the balance between focused discussion of an idea and\nlong-distance leaps in semantic space. We apply our model to three cases of\nincreasing structural complexity: philosophical texts by Aristotle, Hume, and\nKant; four days of parliamentary debate during the French Revolution; and\nbranching comment trees on the discussion website Reddit. In the philosophical\nand parliamentary cases, the model parameters that describe this balance\nconverge under coarse-graining to limit regions that demonstrate the emergence\nof large-scale structure, a result which is robust to translation between\nlanguages. Meanwhile, we find that the political forum we consider on Reddit\nexhibits a debate-like pattern, while communities dedicated to the discussion\nof science and news show much less temporal order, and may make use of the\nemergent, tree-like topology of comment replies to structure their epistemic\nexplorations. Our model allows us to quantify the ways in which social\ntechnologies such as parliamentary procedures and online commenting systems\nshape the joint exploration of ideas.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04013v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04013v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"levy-flights-of-the-collective-imagination","repo_url":"https://github.com/kentchang/ca_divergence","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}