Norbert Weiner - Cybernetics
Resources: Cybernetics
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- “devices of similar character can be used not only to play games and perform other purposive acts but to do so with a continual improvement of performance on the basis of past experience”
- “All of these devices in which an apparatus assumes a specific structure or function on the basis of past experience lead to a very interesting new attitude both in engineering and in biology”
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- “It is, therefore, very exciting for us to be in possession of a means by which engineering structures can produce other structures with a function similar to their own”
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- “The simple linear feedbacks… now are seen to be far less simple and far less linear than they appeared at first view”
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- “I shall understand by a black box a piece of apparatus, such as four-terminal networks with two input and two output terminals, which performs a definite operation on the present and past of the input potential, but for which we do not necessarily have any information of the structure by which this operation is performed”
- “a white box will be a similar network in which we have built in the relation between input and output potentials in accordance with a definite structural plan for securing a previously determined input-output relation”
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- “For heredity to be possible and for cells to multiply, it is necessary that the heredity-carrying components of a cell-the so-called genes-be able to construct other similar heredity-carrying structures in their own image”