BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

AUTOMATA NET 2)

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A finite net of interconnected elements which operate on basis of an on-off logic.

This is a very general model that has been used in genetics (St. KAUFFMAN, 1969), in models of the cerebral cortex (D. DUBOIS, 1991), in connexion machines (T. TOFFOLI & N. MARGULIS, 1987) and quite recently in distributed artificial intelligence (R. BROOKS (1989); C. LANGTON; L. STEELS, 1990)

Automata nets present characteristic emergent properties and behaviors, which depend on the nature of their interconnections or "wiring".

The net must have constraints, i.e. some connections being permitted and other ones suppressed. Flows through the connections can be permanent or more or less intermittent. Furthermore, such nets tend to subdivide into local and specialized subnets and, as a result, simultaneous events in different parts of the net do not propagate their effects instantaneously and generate very complex nonlinear (and sometimes chaotic) behavior.

Automata nets present very numerous alternative possible steady states and in some cases, undergo giant fluctuations that may lead to bifurcations and dissipative structuration.

Once the set of internal states can be specified through a finite state transition matrix, the automata net becomes a finite automaton or, if it produces outputs, can be assimilated to a sequential machine. This does not however make it wholly predictable.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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