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

GENERAL PROBLEM SOLVER 1)2)

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M. RINGLE synthetizes and evaluates as follows the General Problem Solver Program developped by NEWELL and SIMON: "GPS was designed to extract key features from problems, analyze the logic of the problem, generate procedures for dealing with the problem, and then attempt to solve it. The focus was on the generality of GPS, i.e., its ability to handle a wide range of situations, and on its capacity to develop its own heuristics. Unfortunately, a careful examination of the major routines of GPS reveals that the key-feature analysis depends of the logic found in the "table-of-connections" which is pre-programmed, and the technique-generator depends on a selection, by GPS from its "main-methods" table. In short, the critical features which would emancipate GPS from the stigma attached to traditional mechanisms are obscured but not removed. Given a vague problem to solve (or one which fails to fit into the logical schemata GPS uses for key-feature extraction) GPS is at a loss. Moreover, increasing the size of the table-of-connections or the main-methods group would not help to answer the initial objection, that the program fails to actually "cognize" its environment, although it would serve to increase GPS's ability to appear cognitive.

"The real problem lies in the fact that the task environment for GPS and other AI programs is only an "internal representation" of the world in a limited way. GPS does not produce its own symbols and values, but merely manipulates the symbols and values according to its pre-programmed instructions" (1976, p.8).

In short, the GPS is merely a "Partial Problem Solver" (which of course, is not to be despised).

Generally, this is a result of the necessarily algorithmic character of the sequential computers programs.

→ "General Systems Problem Solver".

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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