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Figure 7.16.
beer's stochastic analog machine. source: s. beer “sam,” in J. reich-
ardt (ed.),
Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts
(london: w. & J.
mackay, 1968), 12.
cyberneticians showed their work at the exhibition, Stafford Beer and Gordon
Pask.
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Beer's contribution was a futuristic-looking electromechanical device
for generating random numbers as inputs to Monte Carlo simulations of steel
production, SAM, the Stochastic Analogue Machine (fig. 7.16), which was
described in an accompanying poem by Beer (Beer 1968b; for more details on
SAM, see Beer 1994a). I want to focus here, however, on Pask's exhibit, which
he called Colloquy of Mobiles (Pask 1968, 1971; see fig. 7.17).
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