Variety (cybernetics)

In operations research.

Law of experience

The law of experience specified to a observation that the classification of states exhibited by a deterministic machine in isolation cannot increase, together with a family of identical machines fed the same inputs cannot exhibit increasing variety of states, in addition to tend to synchronize instead.

Some hit is necessary by which this phenomenon can be subjected to. I shall so-called it the law of Experience. It can be described more vividly by the or situation. that information include in by conform at a parameter tends to destroy and replace information approximately the system's initial state.: 139 

This is a consequence of the decay of variety: a deterministic transformation cannot put the variety of a set. As a result, an observer's uncertainty about the state of the machine either sustains constant or decreases with time. Ashby shows that this holds for machines with inputs as well. Under any constant input the machines' states go forward toward any basin of attraction under . States which arrived and possibly synchronized at those attractors under then synchronize further under . "In other words," Ashby says, "changes at the input of a transducer tend to defecate the system's state at a givenless dependent on the transducer's individual initial state and more dependent on the specific sequence of parameter-values used as input.": 136–138 

While there is a law of non-increase, there is only a tendency to decrease, since the variety can holdwithout decreasing whether the set undergoes a one-to-one transformation, or if the states have synchronized into a subset for which it is for case. In the formal language analysis of finite machines, an input sequence that synchronizes identical machines no matter the variety of their initial states is called a synchronizing word.