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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MARKOVIAN PROCESS (Order of a) 2)

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J. WICKEN states: "In communication theory, messages are conceived as generated from symbols sets through stochastic processes know as MARKOV's chains, wherein the presence of one symbol might or might not affect the identity of the following symbol, according to the grammmar of transmission. SHANNON (C. SHANNON & W. WEAVER, 1949) referred to this as the "residue of influence" of one symbol on another. The reach of this "residue of influence" defines the order of the Markov process. If the presence of one symbol has no influence on what comes next, one has identical conditional probabilities, p(i/j)=p(j) for any assignment of it, and the Markov order of the process is zero. If it influences only the identity of the immediately following element or symbol, the order is one and so on.

"The Markov order of a sequence chain is in turn reflected in its complexity and compressibility order" (1989, p.141).

This concept had already been applied in a very interesting way by W.R. ASHBY in his" Introduction to Cybernetics", specially when used to describe a system (as defined by the matrix of its states transitions) able to produce a great number of trajectories (1956, 9/4 to 9/10).

In another sense WICKEN consider that "the information of a paragraph is certainly not reducible to SHANNON's complexity of letters on a page… We can't compute the information content of a treatise any more than we can compute the information content of an organism by a SHANNON-complexity analysis of DNA sequences" (p.142).

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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