We explore the evolution of the structure and performance of a social network in a population of individuals who search for local optima in diverse and dynamic task environments. Individuals choose whether to innovate or imitate and, in the latter case, from whom to learn. The probabilities of...

Scientific progress is driven by innovation ?which serves to produce a diversity of ideas ?and imitation through a social network ?which serves to diffuse these ideas. In this paper, we develop an agent-based computational model of this process, in which the agents in the population are...