Pith Number

pith:WP7XOUTK

pith:2026:WP7XOUTKOSYTCHTVC3B2PXAIBG

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

Universal Dynamics of Punctuated Progress

Dashun Wang, Yian Yin

A minimal model distinguishing radical resets from incremental refinements explains universal patterns of punctuated progress across domains.

arxiv:2605.16719 v1 · 2026-05-16 · physics.soc-ph · cs.AI · cs.SI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{WP7XOUTKOSYTCHTVC3B2PXAIBG}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

The simple model reproduces all three empirical regularities. Remarkably, the leading-order predictions are parameter-independent, identifying a new universality class governing punctuated progress and yielding testable predictions about how openness and access to frontier solutions shape the pace of advance.

C2weakest assumption

That the distinction between radical resets that restructure what is achievable and incremental refinements that exploit the current frontier is the key missing ingredient not captured by existing models from complex systems, record statistics, economics of innovation, and cultural evolution.

C3one line summary

Analysis of 6.8M solutions across 9 domains identifies universal heavy-tailed waiting times, sublinear frontier accumulation, and temporal correlations in record-breaking, explained by a minimal model of radical resets and incremental refinements.

References

59 extracted · 59 resolved · 1 Pith anchors

[1] T. S. Kuhn,The structure of scientific revolutions(University of Chicago Press, 1962) 1962

[2] S. J. Gould and N. Eldredge, Nature366, 223 (1993) 1993

[3] Mokyr, The American Economic Review80, 350 (1990) 1990

[4] Barabasi, Nature435, 207 (2005) 2005

[5] M. Karsai, K. Kaski, A.-L. Barab ´asi, and J. Kert ´esz, Scientific reports2, 397 (2012) 2012

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:02:38.245004Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

b3ff77526a74b1311e7516c3a7dc080992c111f37cd2fba507852bf000303dab

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.16719 · arxiv_version: 2605.16719v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.16719 · pith_short_12: WP7XOUTKOSYT · pith_short_16: WP7XOUTKOSYTCHTV · pith_short_8: WP7XOUTK

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/WP7XOUTKOSYTCHTVC3B2PXAIBG \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: b3ff77526a74b1311e7516c3a7dc080992c111f37cd2fba507852bf000303dab

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "0857d36cfe804e8d3c18774ebdd327c42826f5be3eda70b5550b7cd4727545f4",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI",
      "cs.SI"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "physics.soc-ph",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-16T00:07:38Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "1ec37b556d93db2e538931463900003c38e9195c46d01e463cab077dc31d363d"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.16719",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}