Posts Tagged ‘cybernetics’

Scribblenauts, and the law of requisite variety

When I came across the game scribblenauts – or more specifically, when enraptured, evangelising s’nauting colleagues at work jumped me and made me partake –  I wasn’t as impressed with the idea behind the game as I was with the fact that it had actually been pulled off.
Someone had posited the idea of modelling “everything”, had [...]

Memes: biochemical feedback loops, not viral ads.

There is a lot of mildly conflicting information about memes. They have been categorised as everything from viral ideas (from folks in the marketing / advertising camp) to copied behaviour that spreads through a culture (the behaviourist / socio-anthropologist camp).
The basic idea is that genes do for biological evolution what memes do for cultural evolution. [...]

System Design & Requisite Variety

During the initial phases of a project, and in particular during the design phase, it becomes necessary to decide upon what is actually being built, along with its constituent parts. In short, this is when the team decides how much complexity they’re going to bite off and chew. As it turns out, people aren’t very [...]

Cybernetics and software processes

How might control systems theory, at the heart of cybernetics, inform the way we develop software? Well, cybernetics can be brought into play at 3 different levels:

execution-level control: the software application’s own control systems
test-level control: the software’s test harness that is used to exercise its functionality
process-level control: the methodology that is used develop the software

Evolution, Stability and the sweet spot inbetween

When I met the idea of NK* Boolean networks, I immediately started to wonder if they could ever be a simplistic model for people and processes. In short, what would you get if you swapped the gates with people, the inputs with instructions, and the outputs with tasks that people carry out?