Re: SUO: Re: Starter KB V2 Question #8
Jon Awbrey wrote:
>The ambivalence about embracing versus resolving ambiguities
>is actually due to a formal principle in classical cybernetics,
>a brand of "fighting entropy with entropy" strategy that Ashby
>called the "Law of Requisite Variety" (LORV).
Following is a brief statement of Ashby's law:
The Law of Requisite Variety
The larger the variety of actions available to
a control system, the larger the variety of
perturbations it is able to compensate.
Found (by using Google to search "ashby requisite variety") at:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html
This law may be relevant to a control system that is trying
to adjust to a complex environment. But for the purpose of
defining the KIF ontology, we need a precise way to identify
a particular entity -- for example, some particular control
system that I might want to specify.
In linguistics, the term "resolving ambiguity" means the
selection of the appropriate sense of a polysemous term.
A control system that can handle diverse perturbations is
not really "embracing ambiguity" but trying to use its own
internal variety to resolve the ambiguities in the input
signals (in much the same way that a linguist would resolve
an ambiguity in natural language).
John Sowa