The term black box theory is applied to any field, philosophy and science or otherwise where some inquiry or definition is made into the relations between the appearance of a system (exterior/outside), i.e. The observed hydrograph is a graphic of the response of a watershed (a blackbox) with its runoff (red) to an input of rainfall (blue).īlack box theories are theories defined only in terms of their function. When the experimenter is also motivated to control the box, there is an active feedback in the box/observer relation, promoting what in control theory is called a feed forward architecture. If the observer also controls input, the investigation turns into an experiment (illustration), and hypotheses about cause and effect can be tested directly.
From this there follows the fundamental deduction that all knowledge obtainable from a Black Box (of given input and output) is such as can be obtained by re-coding the protocol (the observation table) all that, and nothing more. Thus every system, fundamentally, is investigated by the collection of a long protocol, drawn out in time, showing the sequence of input and output states. I accidentally pushed the button marked “!”-the Box increased in temperature by 20 ☌.
I pushed over the switch marked K: the note rose to 480 Hz and remained steady. I did nothing-the Box emitted a steady hum at 240 Hz. Thus, using an example from Ashby, examining a box that has fallen from a flying saucer might lead to this protocol: Time All observations of inputs and outputs of a black box can be written in a table, in which, at each of a sequence of times, the states of the box’s various parts, input and output, are recorded. Recording of observed states Īn observer makes observations over time. This principle states that input and output are distinct, that the system has observable (and relatable) inputs and outputs and that the system is black to the observer (non-openable). The understanding of a black box is based on the "explanatory principle", the hypothesis of a causal relation between the input and the output. Many other engineers, scientists and epistemologists, such as Mario Bunge, used and perfected the black box theory in the 1960s. He saw the first step in self-organization as being to be able to copy the output behavior of a black box. A black box was described by Norbert Wiener in 1961 as an unknown system that was to be identified using the techniques of system identification.
#Black box repacks full#
In cybernetics, a full treatment was given by Ross Ashby in 1956. Vitold Belevitch puts the concept of black-boxes even earlier, attributing the explicit use of two-port networks as black boxes to Franz Breisig in 1921 and argues that 2-terminal components were implicitly treated as black-boxes before that. Although Cauer did not himself use the term, others who followed him certainly did describe the method as black-box analysis. In electronic circuit theory the process of network synthesis from transfer functions, which led to electronic circuits being regarded as "black boxes" characterized by their response to signals applied to their ports, can be traced to Wilhelm Cauer who published his ideas in their most developed form in 1941. The modern meaning of the term "black box" seems to have entered the English language around 1945. A black box model can be used to describe the outputs of systems
0 kommentar(er)
