Anticipatory Systems

Book excerpt: The first detailed study of this most important class of systems which contain internal predictive models of themselves and/or of their environments and whose predictions are utilized for purposes of present control. This book develops the basic concept of a predictive model, and shows how it can be embedded into a system of feedforward control. Includes many examples and stresses analogies between wired-in anticipatory control and processes of learning and adaption, at both individual and social levels. Shows how the basic theory of such systems throws a new light both on analytic problems (understanding what is going on in an organism or a social system) and synthetic ones (developing forecasting methods for making individual or collective decisions).