17/13 ANCILLARY REGULATIONS 



should be altered for the future. Often he is acutely aware of 

 the fact that he is not sure where to apply the correction. Should 

 he examine the last few moves and alter his tactics ? Should he, 

 in future, avoid that sort of middle-game ? Or, maybe, should 

 he stop opening with P — Q4 and change to P — K4 ? The young 

 chess-player has not only to solve the problems of what move to 

 make next but also that of where to feed back the corrections. 

 Thus, there may well be players today who are weak simply 

 because, when they lose a game, they change their opening rather 

 than their end-game. 



(In this example the ' parts ' to be modified are strung out in 

 time : the modification has to find the right place in the sequence. 

 The example serves to remind us that a diagram of immediate 

 effects (such as Figure 16/6/1) represents functional, not structural 

 or anatomical relations.) 



17/12. The last two sections have shown that at least five ancillary 

 regulations have to be made if the basic process of ultrastability 

 is to bring adaptation with reasonable efficiency and speed. The 

 next question thus is: how are these ancillary regulations to be 

 achieved ? 



17/13. The answer can be given with some assurance, for all 

 processes of regulation are dominated by the law of requisite 

 variety. (It has been described in i". to C, Chapter 11 ; here will 

 be given only such details as are necessary.) 



This law (of which Shannon's theorem 10 relating to the sup- 

 pression of noise is a special case) says that if a certain quantity 

 of disturbance is prevented by a regulator from reaching some 

 essential variables, then that regulator must be capable of exerting 

 at least that quantity of selection. (Were the law to be broken, 

 we would have a case of appropriate effects without appropriate 

 causes, such as an examinee giving correct answers before he has 

 been given the questions (S. 7/8). ^Scientists work on the assump- 

 tion that such things do not happen; and so far they have found 

 no fact that would make them question the assumption.) The 

 provision of the ancillary regulations thus demands that a process 

 of selection, of appropriate intensity, exist. Where shall we find 

 this process ? 



The biologist, of course, can answer the question at once; for 



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