302 THE LANGUAGE AND CONCEPTS OF CONTROL 



achievement for an elementary process such as heating a house. More sensi- 

 tive detectors provide more accurate feedback and reduce the oscillation 

 about the task. The loss of fine control in a man's attempt to walk along a 

 straight line under the effects of drugs, disease, or alcohol is well known. 



A recent innovation into the heating systems which the human body has 

 had for thousands of years is the facility for anticipation. This takes two phy- 

 sical forms in the human being, only one form in the heating system. The 

 one which is common to both, is the early-warning system: the external 

 thermostat in the heating system, which predicts a change inside as soon as 

 the weather changes; the kinematic (or kinesthetic) sense, for example, in 

 the human which tells him where his hands are even when his eyes are 

 closed. In addition, the human has a memory, which helps his anticipation 

 by extrapolating from the present situation into the future along a path sug- 

 gested by previous experience. Modern computers have the memory circuits 

 and the extrapolation circuits too.** Whether man will eventually be able 

 to make computers which can abstract and then extrapolate with abstrac- 

 tions, as man can do, remains for the future to answer. 



The sensory detectors are so sensitive in the human, and the cerebellum 

 such an effective trimmer on the control apparatus, that man is the ideal ex- 

 ample of a "dead-beat servo," with no cycling at all about the task .... This 

 is true only as a first approximation, however. Thus the physical trim of a 

 trained athlete or of a practiced surgeon is far more precise than that of 

 his neighbor. Similarly, those who are afflicted with Parkinsonism or al- 

 coholism are less precise in their physical and chemical process control. 

 Precise control of the biological chemistry and physics is at the very root of the 

 prevention and cure of disease, and of life itself. 



Memory, Concept and Implementation 



The mind stores information. Physical machines can be made to do this 

 by (a) magnetic tapes or magnetic cores, (b) on-or-off relays, (c) slow pene- 

 tration processes in which electric or sonic signals bounce around inside 

 crystals for a time before escaping, and (d) electrochemical devices such as 

 capacitors. In fact the machine can be programmed to collect information 

 while it is operating and use it thereafter, thus closely simulating man's 

 memory. A recent postulate about the physical nature of neural memory 

 apparatus is that the repeated, passing electrical signal distorts the RNA 



** Perhaps the earliest popularly recognized and amusing example of machine out-anticipat- 

 ing man came during the counting of the U. S. Presidential election returns in 1 948. The com- 

 puter, UNIVAC, on the job seriously for the first time, started predicting a Truman victory 

 at about 8:15 P.M., much to the derision of the human political pundits. By 11 P.M. the pun- 

 dits were beginning to waver, remarking that the pollsters could possibly be wrong. Mean- 

 while UNIVAC was pounding out a 99 per cent certainty for Truman. Dewey finally con- 

 ceded to Truman at 2 A.M ! 



