ROSS ASHBY - The Cybernetic Brain - page 126

in the margin] found a month ago.” The next note, also dated 11 August 1950,
runs for twenty pages (pp. 2955-74) and reveals some of the problems that
Ashby had already run into. It begins, “For a time the construction of the new
machine (see previous page) went well. Then it forced me to realise that my
theory had a yawning hole in it” (p. 2955).
This yawning hole had to do with DAMS's essential variables, the param-
eters it should control. In the original homeostat setups all of the currents
were essential variables, capable of triggering discontinuous changes of state
via the relays and uniselectors. But there was no reason why all of the cur-
rents in DAMS should be essential variables. Some of them should be, but
others would have simply to do with making or breaking connections. Thus, a
new problem arose: how the environment should be supposed to connect to
DAMS's essential variables, and how those variables might act back onto the
environment. 30 The homeostat offered no guidance on this, and the remainder
of this entry is filled with Ashby's thoughts on this new problem. It contains
many subsequently added references to later pages which develop these early
ideas further. In a passage on page 2967, for example, one thought is linked by
an asterisk to a note at the bottom of the page which says, “May '51. Undoubt-
edly sound in aim, but wrong in the particular development used here,” while
in the margin is a note in black ink, “Killed on p. 2974,” and then another note,
“Resurrected p. 3829,” in red. The next paragraph then begins, “This was the
point I reached before I returned to the designing of the electrical machine,
but, as usual, the designing forced a number of purely psychological problems
into the open. I found my paragraph (2) (above) [i.e., the one just discussed
here] was much too vague to give a decisive guide.” The penultimate para-
graph of the entire note ends (p. 2974), “I see no future this way. The idea of
p. 2967 (middle) [i.e., again the one under discussion here] seems to be quite
killed by this last figure.” But then a marginal note again says, “Resurrected
p. 3829” (i.e., 17 May 1952).
The substantial point to take from all this is that the construction of DAMS
posed a new set of problems for Ashby, largely having to do with the specifica-
tion of its essential variables and their relation to the environment, and it was
by no means clear to him how to solve them. 31 And what interests me most
here is that in response to this difficulty, Ashby, if only in the privacy of his
journal, articulated an original philosophy of design .
“The relation of the essential variables to a system of part-functions [e.g.,
the neon tubes] is still not clear, though p. 3074 helps. Start again from first
principles,” Ashby instructed himself on 28 January 1951, but a second note
dated the same day recorded that DAMS was “going to be born any time”