Category Archives: Anamnesis

Re: Peirce List Discussion • (1) • (2) Just to review, we were looking at Ashby’s example of a regulation game as given below. I observed that this gives us a triadic relation whose triples are listed next. Sungchul Ji … Continue reading →

Re: Peirce List Discussion • Sungchul Ji I invited readers to consider Ashby’s example of a regulation game as a triadic relation whose triples are given by either one of the following tables. Sungchul Ji asked a rather good question … Continue reading →

Just enough time for an incidental observation. Consider the table Ashby uses to describe his first example of a regulation game. A table like that is a compact way of describing a triadic relation, in this case a relation whose … Continue reading →

Recall the game between R and D determined by the following data. Here is Ashby’s analysis of how it plays out. Examination of the table soon shows that with this particular table R can win always.  Whatever value D selects … Continue reading →

Ashby now invites us to consider a series of games, beginning as follows. 11/3.   Play and outcome.  Let us therefore forget all about regulation and simply suppose that we are watching two players, R and D, who are engaged in … Continue reading →

Here is the first part of Ashby’s setup for the schematic example I had in mind. Requisite Variety 11/1.   In the previous chapter we considered regulation from the biological point of view, taking it as something sufficiently well understood.  … Continue reading →

I had planned to get down to brass tacks as quickly as possible, with an object example from Ashby’s Cybernetics that made an impression on me at an early stage in my thinking about intelligent systems.  But while I was … Continue reading →

Naturally I had purposes and reflected on my purposes for as long as I can remember but I don’t think I thought about the concept of purpose in a systematic way until I began taking courses on cybernetics and systems … Continue reading →