6 ms·
Why is this relevant today?
by amatic 11y ago
Why is this relevant today?
- e12e 11y agoHow is it not? (In the sense that an introduction to geometry is also relevant today)
- amatic 11y agoIt is a book of some 300 pages, I skimmed it. Doesn't seem true to the promise from the introduction - "to explain control theory without much math". It is also quite long. For an introduction to control theory, I'd recommend Astrom & Murray, and for use of control theory in studying living beings W.T.Powers.
- agumonkey 11y agoFirst time I hear W.T.Powers name but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_control_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_control_theory already inspires a lot.
- dang 11y agoHistory is relevant today. Historical posts are some of the best material we see on Hacker News. More historical posts, please!
- TeMPOraL 11y agoCybernetics, known better today as control theory, is a significant discipline of math with lots of valuable insight applicable to broad areas of sciences and life. My favourite example - grokking the difference between open and closed-loop systems will let you discover the simple idea behind agile methodologies and how 90% of what's written about them is pure marketing bullshit.
- bordercases 11y agoReally, control theory helped you understand Agile? Please, do go on. I would love to hear the specifics.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoTL;DR: waterfall is an open-loop system. In order to control it (the direction of your project, its results), you need to have a perfect model of system internals and know the input. Since you know neither, you simply can't control it. Agile is a closed-loop system, it contains a feedback loop, which lets you control the system even if you don't know the internals perfectly (and with human beings, you'll never know). This is the core insight, though I'm probably skipping things in this description that you know implicitly when you've seen the math. The rest of discussion about agile is either minutiae of tuning the feedback loop for best results, or just marketing talk and bikeshedding.
- toomim 11y agoPlease explain!
- amatic 11y agoCybernetics is not control theory. Control theory existed some decades before Wiener and Ashby, and continued to develop separately from cybernetics. I am very interested in both fields, though less in modern cybernetics which is mostly philosophy and 'poetry' or something like that. What I'm asking why this book in particular is relevant today.
- SixSigma 11y agoModel predictive control is a hot topic in Computational Logistics atm (my field) I expect this is true of other fields too, these things seem to go like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_predictive_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_predictive_control
- andyjohnson0 11y agoAccording to the Wikipedia page on the author [1], "[Ashby's] two books, Design for a Brain and An Introduction to Cybernetics, were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking into the nascent discipline and were highly influential." [1] states that Ashby's work influenced Stafford Beer and Gregory Chaitin. Going back to a discipline's foundational works can be a good way to gain context and understanding. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ross_Ashby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ross_Ashby