Archive image from page 130 of Design for a brain; the. Design for a brain; the origin of adaptive behavior . designforbrainor00ashb Year: 1960 8/11 THE HOMEOSTAT Now the ultrastable system proceeds to a terminal field which is stable in conjunction with all the system's parameter-values (and it is clear that this must be so, for whether the parameters are at their ' usual ' values or not is irrelevant). The ultrastable system will therefore always produce a set of step-mechanism values which is so related to the particular set of parameter-values that, in conjunction with them, the system is
Archive image from page 130 of Design for a brain; the. Design for a brain; the origin of adaptive behavior . designforbrainor00ashb Year: 1960 8/11 THE HOMEOSTAT Now the ultrastable system proceeds to a terminal field which is stable in conjunction with all the system's parameter-values (and it is clear that this must be so, for whether the parameters are at their ' usual ' values or not is irrelevant). The ultrastable system will therefore always produce a set of step-mechanism values which is so related to the particular set of parameter-values that, in conjunction with them, the system is stable. If the para- meters have unusual values, the step-mechanisms will also finish with values that are compensatingly unusual. To the casual observer this adjustment of the step-mechanism values to the parameter-values may be surprising; we, however, can see that it is inevitable. The fact is demonstrable on the Homeostat. After the machine was completed, some ' unusual' complications were imposed on it (' unusual ' in the sense that they were not thought of till the machine had been built), and the machine was then tested to see how it would succeed in finding a stable field when affected by the peculiar complications. One such test was made by joining
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