Good regulator

The good regulator is a theorem conceived by Roger C. Conant and that is central to. It is stated that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system". That is, any that is maximally successful and simple must be  with the system being regulated. This result is obtained by considering the of the variation of the output of the controlled system, and shows that, under very general conditions, that the entropy is minimized when there is a  from the states of the  to the states of the regulator. The minimum is obtained when the map is an isomorphism, that is, when the regulator models the system.

With regard to the brain, insofar as it is successful and efficient as a regulator for survival, it must proceed, in learning, by the formation of a model (or models) of its environment.

The theorem is general enough to apply to all regulating and self-regulating or s.

The theorem does not explain what it takes for the system to become a good regulator. The problem of creating good regulators is addressed by the theorem, and by the theory of.

When restricted to the ODE subset of, it is referred to as the , which was first articulated in 1976 by B. A. Francis and W. M. Wonham. In this form, it stands in contrast to classical control, in that the classical fails to explicitly model the controlled system (although the classical controller may contain an implicit model).