Being a robot - 101: The cybernetic loop

I realized that I was just assuming that everyone knew how robots think.
Or for that matter, how babies think when they have to grab something.

We usually think of actions as big chunks, such as "Catch the ball."

Robots have to operate on a much more detailed, step by step level, with everything spelled out for them. Nothing is certain, so everything is just a process of getting a little closer and seeing if anything broke yet. And repeat.

They do this by following a very simple loop, over and over again. Spot where the ball is. Push your hand towards it a little bit. Remember that your hand doesn't always end up where you were trying to push it. Figure out which way the ball is NOW from your hand. Push your hand that way one notch. Figure out again which way the ball is now. Push your hand. Etc.

In a diagram, it would look something like this:
Congratulations! If you understand that diagram, you are much closer to understanding how anything works. Actually, I think you're one huge step close to understanding how almost everything works.

There is a cycle of action, looking, planning, action, looking, planning, etc. Over and over.

The "planning" tends to be very short-range, uncomplicated planning - but what it lacks in complexity, it makes up for with speed and persistence and never getting bored.

So here's a very powerful fact about life. Not only does "a journey of 1000 leagues start with one step", but sometimes the ONLY way to plan that journey is one step at a time.

In fact, a series of small steps is a thousand times more capable than one big step, regardless how clever you are, and regardless how well "planned" that one step is. It took computer scientists almost 50 years to figure out that many small computers is actually much better than one large computer for getting work done. It took "artificial intelligence" workers about 30 years to figure out that many small, dumb rules added up to a better way to work than one huge, complicated rule - and it was easier to write and easier to fix too.

Why is this? Imagine that you are on one side of a small woods and you want to get to the other side.

It is very likely that there is no direction you can pick to walk in a straight line that won't bump into a tree.

But, if each step can be a slightly different direction, there are thousands of paths you can use to walk through the same forest without running into a tree.

What's the moral? It seems so "obvious" now, but it baffled scientists for 50 years -- a "curved" path is more flexible than a "straight" one. You can get places with a stupid little loop as guidance that no amount of clever planning can get you if you have to move in one step in one straight line.

This kind of cycle with many tiny steps and a very short pause to think between each step is called a "cybernetic loop". It looks deceptively simple, while it is amazingly powerful.

It can keep on working if the wind is blowing, without having to be reprogrammed. It can keep on working if the ball is rolling on a bumpy hillside. It can keep on working if your robot arm is rusty and doesn't always move as far as it used to when you push it, and sometimes it sticks entirely. This deceptive little loop is all the computer programming required, essentially.

Now, it will work a little better if the robot has some learning capacity and has done this kind of reaching thing before. The robot may learn that it should reach for where the ball will be, not where it is now.

You learned this so long ago you have forgotten that you learned it. Imagine a baseball game where the batter hits a high, fast ball and the guy in the field runs towards home base instead of towards where the ball looks like it will come down again, because that's "where the ball is now."
So, yes, taking the speed of the ball into account does help. But that's a minor change to the program. The same loop works, except the "planning" step is a little bit longer.

So, this is profound wisdom I'm giving you here. It took all of mankind 50 years to figure this out, and some haven't got the news yet. You get it for free, right here, right now.

So, let me run it by you one more time. Here's the same moral, or same story, in slightly different words:

A plan of action that involves a repeated cycle of very small steps, with some looking and thinking between steps, is much more flexible, and much more "powerful" than trying to "solve" any problem in huge step.

Furthermore, if the world is complicated, and tends to have hills and bumps and wind gusts and rusty arms, you can be guaranteed that no "single-step" plan will ever succeed. In that case, ONLY a multi-step approach will get you where you want to go. If your job involves "going through the woods" and around trees that you don't even know about yet, it is much easier to plan to go around trees than try to "collect data" on the location of every tree, put it into some huge list or database, print out a map, and find "a straight path" through the forest.

This doesn't say "don't bother planning." It does say, "don't waste your time trying to find a linear solution to a curved path." There are millions of curved paths that can work just fine, in cases, like the woods, where there is no straight path possible.

And, one more time through it, from the Institute of Medicine's perspective, as in dealing with small teams (called "microsystems"). If you are dealing with a "complex, adaptive system" (like a hospital), it is way more powerful to just rig up the team with eyes and a feedback loop than it is to try to have hospital management "plan" how to improve things. Ditto for "The Toyota Way", or the power of "continuous improvement" or what Demings taught, or a "plan do check act (PDCA) cycle".

Empowering your front-line employees by giving them "eyes" and a little room to maneuver on their own to get around "trees" is a very powerful strategy that works in practice.

It is based on the most powerful "algorithm" we know of today - the "cybernetic loop."

Oh, yes, one more tiny thing. Since this is such a powerful "algorithm" or "paradigm" or way of doing things, much of Nature and your body already knew about it and uses it.

Public Health is sort of vaguely discovering that the "action" step always needs to be followed with a "reflection" or "assessment" step, but hasn't yet sprung to the fact that it is reinventing the wheel, or more precisely, the cybernetic loop, yet one more time. It hasn't figured out that many smaller steps adds up to a more powerful path-generator than one large step.

And, sigh, enterprise budget processes don't reflect this wisdom. For years I fought with the fact that Universities tend to have "annual budget cycles", and enterprise computing is seen as coming in only two flavors: "maintenance" and "huge projects". Maintenance money can only be spent keeping things the same. Huge Project money ("capital budgets") can only be used to take, well, huge steps in a big straight line, and the big straight line, or "project plan" has to be computed up front and committed to before starting.

Well, duh, no wonder that doesn't work. That CANNOT BE MADE TO WORK. There are too many unknowns and unknowables, too many rusty arms, too many trees.

But every time it fails, the "solution" is to plan every LARGER steps next time, with a much BIGGER database that lists every single tree and bush and pothole. THEN, oh boy, you betcha we'll succeed.

Nope. That's a bad algorithm, a bad paradigm. The cybernetic loop model tells us the answer is way back at the other end: continuous, incremental, small improvement steps. Steps driven by local "feedback" that doesn't even involve upper management.

You can get to places you need to go with a million simultaneous tiny, sensible steps that people can understand that you cannot get to with one huge project, regardless how many billions you spend on "planning" it. Our whole accounting system, meant to help us spend money wisely, is causing us to spend it foolishly.

As the IOM report realizes - "We don't need a billion dollar project -- we need a billion, one-dollar projects." (paraphrased from "Crossing the Quality Chasm"). This isn't "sour grapes" or "some dumb idea" -- this is the most profound wisdom humanity has come up with yet.

It's kind of the Chinese approach. If every person picks up one piece of trash a day, it's way more successful than if every person sends $1000 per year into a central location where we build the Institute of Trash Pickup and study the trash-pickup problem and produce endless reports and finally some huge trash collection system that doesn't really work but is really expensive to maintain when they're not on strike (thank you, John Gall, for that insight.)

Ditto for installation of some kind of automated physician order entry system or other massive cultural change of the way things are done. It may seem "hard" to figure out what huge new system, in one step, will get us from point A to point B. Hmmm. Maybe that's because there aren't any "one-step" solutions to getting through the forest, and we need to reconsider our approach. Maybe a million tiny adjustments will solve two problems at once: the "What do we do?" problem, and the every popular "How do we implement it?" problem.

Ten thousand tiny search engines (people) each looking for one tiny step that is possible and totally understood that would help "a little bit" actually constitutes a "massively parallel supercomputer" that can outstrip almost any other way of "solving" BOTH of those problems simultaneously. That's really cool, because it turns out not to matter how great a solution is on paper or at some other site, if there's no way to get it implemented here without spilling the coffee and crashing the bus. That's the lesson Toyota learned. Forget central planning, which the Soviet Union demonstrated doesn't work. Empower the troops to use their eyes and brains and good judgement and make a million adjustments of 0.001 percent size.

It's an incredibly powerful algorithm. It doesn't require brilliant central planning officers. But it does require believing that the ground troops have enough brains to carry their coffee across the office without spilling it, even if they just waxed the floor. Turns out, according to Toyota, that's probably true.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot. It would seem to make sense that, if this cybernetic doodad is so powerful, that it is in operation already in billions of places around us in society and biology. That would argue that it might be worthwhile to have cybernetic doodad detectors, and cybernetic doodad statistical tools available to use to spot and describe and tweak such thingies.

Most of the last 6 months postings to this weblog have tried to make that argument, in more complex ways, and maybe that's my problem.

The American Indians knew this - that the Great Spirit worked in circles, not lines. Taoism knows about circles and cycles. "Systems thinking" involves accepting that there are important places where feedback loops just might possibly be involved.

We're so close now. Bring it home, baby!

(Posted in memory of Don Herbert, "Mr. Wizard", who died last week, and taught millions of kids, including me, basic science-made-easy on his TV show.)