4 ms·
Every Good Regulator of a System Must Be a Model of That System (1970) [pdf]
- PaulHoule 9y agosee https://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-Livingston/dp/0937063053 https://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-Livingston/dp/093706... and https://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-W-Livingston/dp/0937063061 https://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-W-Livingston/dp/0... for practical applications of Ashby thinking.
- hkon 9y agoDo you know any other books around the same topic. I'm not sure what good keywords would be for this. Ebooks preferrably. Looks interesting.
- walterbell 9y agoFree 2017 ebook with overview of cybernetics: https://www.google.com/amp/newbooksnetwork.com/liss-c-werner-cybernetics-state-of-the-art-tech-uni-of-berlin-press-2017/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/newbooksnetwork.com/liss-c-werner... Many resources: http://pangaro.com/definition-cybernetics.html http://pangaro.com/definition-cybernetics.html
- hkon 9y agoThanks! Many of the articles on pangaro.com were quite interesting.
- kaycebasques 9y agoIt’d be nice to list the names of the books, rather than just links. I’m curious about your suggestions, but don’t necessarily want to visit Amazon.
- doppelganger27 9y agoThe books are "Have Fun at Work" and "Friends in High Places," both by William L. Livingston
- aristus 9y agoIt feels like people keep rediscovering the implications of Turing-completness in different domains.
- iamcurious 9y agoWould you mind expanding your comment?
- jessriedel 9y agoI don't think anyone doubts that being able to regulate a Turing machine would require a system that is Turing complete. But this seems very far from saying that regulating any system requires a complete (isomorphic) model it. Or did you mean something else?
- aristus 9y agoA surprisingly large number of things that we normally don't think of as computers are Turing-complete. It's a very low bar of complexity. And regulating requires modeling requires simulation. That's what Turing's result says: to know whether a program halts you must run it.
- jessriedel 9y agoA surprisingly large number of things can be modeled as Hamiltonian systems -- in fact, all things -- but this does not imply that Liouville's theorem can be usefully applied universally (or even frequently). The reason is that the subset of variables we actually have access to and care about are not Hamiltonian. Likewise, observing that some microscopic piece of a system has operations that can be mapped on to a Turing machine does not mean that the output of the Turing machine controls the variables we care about. Additionally, we prove constraints about the outputs of particular software (executed on Turing machines) all the time. Noting that some piece of a system is isomorphic to a Turing machine does not actually mean it will be fed arbitrary instructions.
- salawat 9y agoDon't know why parent was downvoted... If one can't make the connection between Turing completeness/automata theory and Neuro-cognititive function...think more.
- sytelus 9y agoThis is interesting in context of so-called model-free and model-based reinforcement learning.
- jey 9y agoI tacitly assumed that "model-free" really meant "model has been marginalized out", i.e. instead of treating it as a function to be estimated/learned through regression. Is that not the case?
- amatic 9y ago>> modelling might in fact be a necessary part of regulation. That seems false. PID is used all over, no models. Very simple, very effective.
- maxerickson 9y agoOne way to look at a PID controller is that it uses a simple model that is correct in a lot of situations.
- euyyn 9y agoYeah tuning the PID controller is in fact modeling the dynamics of the system. You can't really expect an untuned PID controller to just work.
- sobellian 9y agoThe fact that PID loops work for many systems is a consequence of the dynamics of those systems, for example that the integral of velocity is position and the derivative of velocity is acceleration. A vast array of phenomena can be modeled as 2nd order linear ODEs.
- carlmr 9y agoWhich just means that for many things your brain doesn't need a new model, just to parametrize one of the most common models.
- xaedes 9y agolinear model
- theoh 9y agoI think this Wiki page discusses it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_model_(motor_control) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_model_(motor_control)
- nabla9 9y agoYes. That sentence is generally untrue if the context is not specified. Either the authors made rudimentary error or they specified the context. If you read forward, they define the problem and discuss error and cause controlled regulation.
- richard_todd 9y agoI don’t see how the last sentence (the brain must model the environment) follows from the admission on the previous page that a regulator can skip the model by taking on unnecessary complexity. It seems there is a built-in assumption that the brain has no unnecessary complexity, if I am following correctly. I wouldn’t be so sure about that! (Although, I should add, the idea that the brain models its environment sounds intuitively true beyond question... I’m just trying to follow the arguments put forth in the paper itself.)
- liquidwax 9y agoLOL. The second paragraph in the abstract starts with "m this paper a theorem is presented […]"
- organsnyder 9y agoProbably an OCR error.
- adrianmonk 9y agoEspecially likely since the Introduction section contains has "i(lea" instead of "idea".