Universal Dynamics of Punctuated Progress

In three linesAnalysis of 6.8M solutions across 6.7K tasks in 9 domains (materials, structural biology, AI, computational biomedicine, data science, theoretical CS, F1, wheel building). Three universal patterns: heavy-tailed waiting times, sublinear record accumulation, temporal correlation of breakthroughs. Minimal model unifies radical innovation and incremental refinement.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified