Milestones
2025
30th August 2025
Redesign of landing pages
In order to better explain Fundamental Theory building and how this platform works the Home-, About- and News- pages were redesigned:
16th May 2025
New video: "Make Measurable Progress"
This New video shows how Fundamental Theory Building allows the social sciences to move away from making individual, disjoint ad-hoc investigations of specific phenomena and towards collaboratively working on a powerful, shared fundamental theory.
18th April 2025
New video: "How it Works"
This New video gives a general introduction to Tree of Knowledge and explains all the basic concepts and ideas that make this technology work
16th March 2025
New video: "Overview of Advantages"
This video compares the fundamental theories that are created in Tree of Knowledge to conventional statistical models and explains the 10 biggest advantages of fundamental theories
2024
3rd November 2024
New video: "Filter out the Noise"
In this video the biggest obstacle to studying complex systems is explained: not being able to isolate phenomena and the resulting noise. The video also shows how Tree of Knowledge can help deal with this obstacle and thereby open up many areas of research that have sofar been too complex to study
12th October 2024
New video: "Reliable & Universal Insights "
This video shows what a game changer Fundamental Theory Building is: where conventional statistics leads to very unreliable findings (see replication crisis), fundamental theories are highly reliable, rigorously proven and universal
11th May 2024
New video: "How it works v1 "
This video is the predecessor of the "How it works" video published on 18th April 2025. It's not quite as good as misses a good Intro.
Creating this video involved learning to use the softwares: Inkscape (for vectorgraphics) and Sozi (vectorgraphic animation).
7th April 2024
New video: "Building Exact Social Sciences"
This video looks at what is special about exact/hard sciences and shows how the Fundamental Theory Building approach is able to produce exact Social Sciences.
Creating this video involved learning to use the softwares: Blender, Elevenlabs and VideoPad Editor.
2023
2022
2021
March - November 2021
Practical application in research
The software Tree of Knowledge was used in two different research projects:
  • A project involving modelling people's satisfaction in doing tasks of varying complexity, resulting in this paper
  • This other project focussed on traffic simulation
The main take away from these projects is that the further work is required to make this software easily usable in any scenario
Research project "Modelling people's satisfaction in doing tasks of varying complexity"
The published paper
Satisfaction for different complexities
Correlation matrix
Research project "Traffic simulation"
Scraped car park occupancy numbers
Spacial clustering of road-side parking
Price curve
Jan - August 2021
Creating 6 new videos
In order to explain the novel Fundamental Theory Building approach and it's overwhelming advantages, six different videos were created, each highlighting a different aspect of this approach. These are:
"Inspired by human understanding"
This video shows how Tree of Knowledge mimicks the way we humans create models of how the complex and hidden inner mechanisms of people work. It compiles and reconciles many different experiences in the same way.
2-minute-long introduction video
"Advantages for Data Scientists"
This video looks at all kinds of models that are available to data scientists, specifically those focused at gaining an understanding of the underlying system.
"Advantages for Psychologists"
This video focuses on the advantages for Psychologists such as:
  • getting robust & generalisable results by combining many studies
  • being able to use observational datasets
  • having your findings be used in many fields
"Advantages for Sociologists"
This video highlights the advantages of doing Approximate Bayesian Computation for agent-based models and the immense value if you reuse the same agents in many models.
"Overview"
This video provides an overview of how tree of knowledge works. The different functionalitites are explained, using the example of determining the probability of a women to birth a child in any given year.
Jan 2021
Autoscaling worker pool for large-scale parallelization
For doing Bayesian Inference, Tree of Knowledge has to run simulations over and over again with different parameter values. For large simulations and simulations with many unknown parameters, this can take quite some time.
To speed up this process, I implemented an architecture where the Tree of Knowledge backend puts simulation tasks on a celery queue and there is a pool of workers (servers) that take tasks from the queue and run the simulations - see diagram below.
If the simulation is very big, then automatically further workers are started and join in.
The code for these workers can be found in this GitHub repository.
2000
15th October 2020
Practical application: Birth probabilities
There already had been great work done in modelling the probability of a woman to give birth to a child in any given year. For example, this research used a dataset called the "National Longitudinal Survey of Youth" to model this "birth probability".

In order to demonstrate Tree of Knowledge's ability to get more accurate and reliable insights by training on multiple datasets, a very basic test was done - the same birth probability was modelled, but was trained on two datasets instead of the one: You can see that this is very different to a meta analysis, as the two datasets are very different: the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth contains data on individual people; the fertility rate data contains data on age-range-groups.
The test was a success, you can see some of the results below.
Images from the birth probability analysis
Images from presentations about this
(presentation1, presentation2)
3rd July 2020
Enable more complex behavior rules
Behavior rules calculate the next timestep's value for a variable, using any of the current actor's own attributes or attributes of an agent related to the current actor.
When creating behavior rules you had the option to use one or more of the following options:
  • "If Condition" - condition that has to be satisfied for the rule to fire
  • "Parameters" - unknown rule parameters that will be inferred using Bayesian Inference
  • "Uncertain/Probabilistic rule" - probability for the rule to trigger; also inferred with Bayesian Inference

Now, the additional option "Aggregation" was added. This allows variables such as a country's "Average fertility rate" to be calculated as aggregated value from many people/population groups.
As far as we can tell, you now are able to define absolutely any behavior rule you could think of.
Rule creation view
Example rule with aggregation
Example simulation in which aggregation matters
12th November 2019
Migration from Heroku to AWS
This webservice/online platform had been hosted on servers from the Cloud Provider "Heroku". The server was getting too slow for running intensive simulations and Heroku however only offers limited options for scaling. It was therefore necessary to migrate the webservice to AWS.
Diagram of the architecture on AWS
Screenshot of AWS console

23rd February 2020
Admin Pages completed
In order to monitor and manage this online platform (especially the Knowledge Base), specific Admin pages were created which are only accessible for users with admin rights.
All Attributes view
Identify possibly duplicate objects
Django admin
Run pre-prepared scripts
30th November 2019
Result Inspector & Simulation Inspector created
A new page was created that
Rule creation view
Example rule with aggregation
Example simulation in which aggregation matters
30th November 2019
Rule editor created
Behavior rules calculate the next timestep's value for a variable, using any of the current actor's own attributes or attributes of an agent related to the current actor.
When creating behavior rules you had the option to use one or more of the following options: As far as we can tell, you now are able to define absolutely any behavior rule you could think of.
Rule creation view
Example rule with aggregation
Example simulation in which aggregation matters
12th August 2019
Simulation editor created
Behavior rules calculate the next timestep's value for a variable, using any of the current actor's own attributes or attributes of an agent related to the current actor.
When creating behavior rules you had the option to use one or more of the following options: As far as we can tell, you now are able to define absolutely any behavior rule you could think of.
Rule creation view
Example rule with aggregation
Example simulation in which aggregation matters
12th January 2019
Knowledge base created
Behavior rules calculate the next timestep's value for a variable, using any of the current actor's own attributes or attributes of an agent related to the current actor.
When creating behavior rules you had the option to use one or more of the following options: As far as we can tell, you now are able to define absolutely any behavior rule you could think of.
Rule creation view
Example rule with aggregation
Example simulation in which aggregation matters




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