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. Being a process of information transfer it is of course subject to the laws of information mentioned in the previous chapters.a communication process between box and investigator and this search is nicely characterized by Ashby as The only course open to the investigator is to search for constraints in the behavior and responses of the box, i.e. a mechanism whose laws are hidden from the investigator. a "black box," the deduction of the structure ofp.217 By now the reader must be fully aware of the importance Ashby placed on constraints. He pointed out that they are the essence of organization and hence of structure in multivariable systems; he showed that they can be measured with information theory; further, he showed that when a dynamic deterministic system is allowed to run to equilibrium, constraints will appear which ultimately explain such phenomena as adaptive behavior and intelligence. In this section are several key papers concerned with the analysis of constraints. The first paper, "General Systems Theory as a New Discipline," is included here because it discusses, along with other matters of interest,
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