Cybernetics

The study of decision-making systems, particularly control systems. In cybernetics the components of the system are treated as black boxes and the focus is on the connections and the behavior of the system as a whole. How the components change other components or are changed by other components is the core of the study, behavior over composition.

There is an art and science of cybernetics, the art is how you conceptualize or describe a system, the scientific part kicks in once you have your model/description of the system.

When describing control systems, a few key concepts come into play:

• “Variety” of a system is the number of states a system can exist in.
• The “principle of requisite variety” states that in order to be “regulator” of a system you need an equal amount of variety as the system.
• ‘variety attenuation’: reducing information/state (simplifying) to make it more manageable/controllable. This is important for matching regulator variety to the system’s variety
• ‘(regulatory) variety amplification’: the amplification of a regulator by creating ‘regulatory sub systems’.
• ‘regulation by veto’: a way to simplify amplification where a sensor simply says whether a system state is acceptable or not
• Splitting the problem: when trying to a regulator an unmanageable information flow, we can filter and split the flows into manageable disecrete problems. This splitting though is responsible for the Accountability problems where trying to regulate several discrete problem sets you end up with an overall result that is undesired.