Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Here, then, we have an example of one way in which Beer's cybernetics tried
to handle the unknown—a predictor that reviewed its own performance in
the name of predicting better.
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The values of the twelve parameters were measured daily in the steel mill
and “were plotted on boards in an Operations Room for the benefit of man-
agement, as a by-product of this research” (Beer 1962a, 205). A plot of a year's
readings is shown in figure 6.7, which Beer referred to as an encephalogram
(205). He was reaching here for a suggestive connection between his work in
management and brain science à la Grey Walter, referring to emergent period-
icities in the data and noting that the “encephalographer finds this structural
component of information (the brain rhythm) of more importance than either
its amplitude or voltage” (182). This tempting idea seems to have proved a red
herring, alas; I am not aware of any subsequent development of it, by Beer or
anyone else. Several other, readily automatable statistical and mathematical
transformations of these data then followed, and the work of the T-machine,
as simulated at Templeborough, was said to be complete. Given that “the T-
Machine was said to be set-theoretically equivalent to a V-Machine,” the prob-
lem of constructing the latter could be said to have been shown to be soluble,
too (208). But figure 6.4 also shows the intervention of the U-machine, the
homeostatic brain, into the life of the cybernetic factory: what about that?
Figure 6.7.
An EEG of the firm. Source: Beer 1994a, 206, fig. 5.
