Abstract
Recent work on the fundamental processes of regulation in biology (Ashby, 1956) has shown the importance of a certain quantitative relation called the law of requisite variety. After this relation had been found, we appreciated that it was related to a theorem in a world far removed from the biological—that of Shannon on the quantity of noise or error that could be removed through a correction-channel (Shannon and Weaver, 1949; theorem 10). In this paper I propose to show the relationship between the two theorems, and to indicate something of their implications for regulation, in the cybernetic sense, when the system to be regulated is extremely complex.
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References
Ashby, W. Ross, Design for a brain. 2nd. imp. Chapman and Hall, London, 1954.
Ashby, W. Ross, An introduction to cybernetics. Chapman and Hall, London, 1956.
Bourbaki, N., Théorie des ensembles. Fascicule de résultats. A.S.E.I. No. 1141. Hermann et Cie, Paris, 1951.
Neumann, J. and Morgenstern, O., Theory of games and economic behaviour. Princeton, 1947.
Shannon, C. E. and Weaver, W, The mathematical theory of communication. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1949.
Sommerhoff, G., Analytical biology. Oxford, University Press, London, 1950.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Ashby, W.R. (1991). Requisite Variety and Its Implications for the Control of Complex Systems. In: Facets of Systems Science. International Federation for Systems Research International Series on Systems Science and Engineering, vol 7. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0718-9_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0718-9_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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