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.

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PLAYER (von NEUMANN's): a critical view 2)

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G. BATESON writes: "The 'player' of a von Neumannian game is a mathematical fiction, comparable to the Euclidian straight line in geometry or the Newtonian particle in physics. By definition, the player is capable of all computations necessary to solve whatever problems the events of the game may present; he is incapable of not performing these computations whenever they are appropriate; he always obeys the findings of his computations. Such a player receives information from the events of the game and acts appropriately upon that information…

"… in von NEUMANN's formal definition of a 'game' all problems which the game may present are conceived as computable, i.e., while the game may contain problems and information of many different logical types, the hierarchy of these types is strictly finite" (1973, p.255).

Most important of all "The player in incapable of 'error'…, he is by definition incapable of 'learning by trial and error'" (p.256), which shows him (it!) as a perfectly programed automata and thus a poor model of very complex real systems (including artificial ones like neural computers, of which it has been said that they are "very difficult to program").

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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