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Comment by kilgnad | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't look formal at all.

Usually formal theories need a logical mathematical language to fully characterize it. I scanned the wikipedia of cybernetics and it's just not it.

Control theory or signals is the closest formal theory to cybernetics. The problem with this theory is that it only characterizes very specific systems that have ordinal values as inputs and outputs. What if the input is text? What if it's tuples of tree like tokens?

The closest theory that encompasses the intuition of what we think of when we use the word "systems" is category theory in my experience. And this theory is in fact sort of too general to be very useful.

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you consider scrolling through wikipedia a review of the formality of the field? I think you may need to consider how formal you are :)

And no, category theory is not even approaching explaining this. At all.

> you consider scrolling through wikipedia a review of the formality of the field? I think you may need to consider how formal you are :)

Yeah I did. Not one math equation and two informal diagrams describing the same thing.

Most formal theories outside of programming languages use western mathematical syntax for the foundational dialect and I don't see anything related to that here. Cybernetics similar in a sense to "system design" in that it's not formal imo.

See category theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory for what I mean by "formal language".

>And no, category theory is not even approaching explaining this. At all.

It does. It unifies all of mathematics at the lowest level and operate at all levels of abstraction and even recursively. Category theory can describe category theory. The problem is we have no definition in this theory about what is a better design? It's just a description of designs.

Cybernetics is fairly formalized, but a lot of research into it was dropped. Cybernetics is based on information theory and approaches systems in a probabilistic way which is in direct contrast to the AI approach of the 50s and 60s which were really about processing discrete pieces of data.

If you read cybernetics texts today, they paint a picture very similar to neural networks and the statistical methods for processing data. "Introduction to Cybernetics" by W. Ross Ashby is a decent text with a lot of good exercises. I still think there's a lot to learn here.

>It does. It unifies all of mathematics at the lowest level

This was attempted before by Russel & Whitehead before Godel proved that any sufficiently complicated system can produce non-truths and false statements that cannot be verified by that same system.

>This was attempted before by Russel & Whitehead before Godel proved that any sufficiently complicated system can produce non-truths and false statements that cannot be verified by that same system.

I never made the claim the system was complete.

>If you read cybernetics texts today, they paint a picture very similar to neural networks and the statistical methods for processing data. "Introduction to Cybernetics" by W. Ross Ashby is a decent text with a lot of good exercises. I still think there's a lot to learn here.

well unfortunately I don't see anything formal in the Wikipedia. I'll take a deeper look at that text though.

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