*Resources:* [[Cybernetics]] - -- — - “devices of similar character can be used not only to play games and perform other purposive acts but to do so with a continual improvement of performance on the basis of past experience” - “All of these devices in which an apparatus assumes a specific structure or function on the basis of past experience lead to a very interesting new attitude both in engineering and in biology” — - “It is, therefore, very exciting for us to be in possession of a means by which engineering structures can produce other structures with a function similar to their own” — - “The simple linear feedbacks… now are seen to be far less simple and far less linear than they appeared at first view” — - “I shall understand by a black box a piece of apparatus, such as four-terminal networks with two input and two output terminals, which performs a definite operation on the present and past of the input potential, but for which we do not necessarily have any information of the structure by which this operation is performed” - “a white box will be a similar network in which we have built in the relation between input and output potentials in accordance with a definite structural plan for securing a previously determined input-output relation” — - “For heredity to be possible and for cells to multiply, it is necessary that the heredity-carrying components of a cell-the so-called genes-be able to construct other similar heredity-carrying structures in their own image”