Fig. 1
Products, components and usefulness for three sectors. We studied products and components from three sectors. a In language, the products are 79,258 English words and the components are the 26 letters. b In gastronomy, the products are 56,498 recipes from the databases allrecipes.com, epicurious.com and menupan.com23, and the components are 381 ingredients. c In technology, the products are 1158 software products catalogued by stackshare.io and the components are 993 development tools used to make them. d–f The usefulness of a component is the number of products we can make that contain it. We find that the relative usefulness of a component depends on how many other components have already been acquired. For each sector, we show the usefulness of three typical components: averaged at each stage over all possible choices of the other acquired components and—for gastronomy—for a particular random order of component acquisition (points)
