Talk:Black box

This article was previously nominated for deletion. The result of the discussion was keep.

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Disambig?

The 'Common Uses' section includes many examples that are irrelevant to "black box systems" These should be transferred to the disambiguation page at Black box (disambiguation)

71.233.228.144 (talk) 02:43, 19 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The Aviation black boxes (photos and mention) are not relevant to this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.227.241.18 (talk) 16:38, 22 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think that this page should focus more on Black Boxes as they are originally stated that is a device or system where the impute and output are known but the inner workings are unknown. This can be anything from a Search Engine or Taco Bell fast food. In response to my changes sounding like a conspiracy I do believe that our reliance on search engines should be looked at but that it is not really a conspiracy. Burns28 (talk) 17:04, 27 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that this article should concentrate on the usage as stated in the definition in the lede, the article needs to be about something identifiable, not a dicdef of every conceivable meaning of the phrase. I also think it should concentrate on the technical usage (again as stated in the lede) as applied in science and engineering (no Taco Bells please, whatever they might be). I don't think that it will be possible to remove the aviation "black box" to the dab page because dab pages cannot have chunks of description on them nor can the entry have multiple links (I see someone has reverted it already). Besides, even though the flight recorder article says they are called black boxes for a different reason, ironically, they are a pretty ideal example of a black box in our meaning; in that it is of no concern how the recording is actually made. SpinningSpark 21:02, 30 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

At the very least, I'm moving the flight recorder reference to the end of the list of common uses; then maybe it won't reappear as the leading instance, contrary to the lede. Also going to use some of SpinningSpark's explanation here on the talk page in that bullet. Benmiller314 (talk) 16:07, 10 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

oscilloclast earlier?

Word has it that a magic healing machine by Abrams called the oscilloclast was named a black box. This tool was used to heal patients on a distance with some sort of waves (compare bioresonance), the waves were obtained by some other weird tool. When opened the machines' internals consisted of nothing more than wires connected to lights and buzzers. A typical black box if you ask me! See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Abrams#Debunking and a source for this claim would be [1] Williams, William F. (2000). Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience (Facts-on-File) but I do not have access to this book myself. Arakrys (talk) 15:55, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Use in cybernetics

The reference given is to the preface of Norbert Wiener's second edition of 1961. The first edition of 1948 does not have a preface, and doesn't have an index either, but I think does not mention the term 'black box'. On the other hand, Ross Ashby's An introduction to cybernetics of 1956 has a whole chapter on the black box (chapter 6). The whole treatment is extremely interesting, and for our purposes I think it is the prime reference for 'black box' in cybernetics. Macdonald-ross (talk) 11:57, 25 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Importance of this article

See this article traffic statistics (normal-average 650 pageviews) and compare with System's article normal-average 1200 pageviews, and Flight recorder's normal-average 300 pageviews. It is more important than the flight recorder, and have only a half of system pageviews.

I think this article need help, to review and enhance... I will start to work (slowly), but there are more people in nowadays interesting to work here? --Krauss (talk) 15:45, 11 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

PS: can anybody "transcribes" this draft-JPEG into a good SVG?

What are the key features of that diagram that the existing diagram in the article does not have? I can create an svg, but I am not inclined to do the work just for aesthetic reasons. There's always Wikipedia:Graphics Lab. SpinningSpark 21:57, 12 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The "clean style" of File:Blackbox.svg is good (!), I think it is more a didactic question, illustrating a "cuboid box" have some appeal.. There are a lot of misconceptions and mistakes about black boxes (see Flight_recorder#Terminology), and I imagine that a an alternative 3D illustration can be used in some other articles to show introduce the backbox. Example: a blackbox (thumb) illustration can also be used in open system and flight recorder. --Krauss (talk) 11:05, 19 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

MERGE

Suggestion: to merge Black box theory and Blackboxing here, with Black box#Theory (changing to "Theories"). --Krauss (talk) 21:20, 20 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with merging black box theory, that's exactly what this article is about. Not so sure about blackboxing, that article seems to be more about social constructs. SpinningSpark 23:31, 20 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to fully agree with SpinningSpark. -- Mdd (talk) 01:17, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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Charles II and Duke of Monmouth

I have removed the following passage from the article's history section:

Historically, the term "black box" figured prominently in the political controversies of late 17th Century England. Radical Protestant agitators such as Robert Ferguson asserted that there existed a Black box containing documentary proof of a secret marriage between King Charles II and his early mistress Lucy Walter. Such a marriage would make make Lucy Walter's son, the Duke of Monmouth, into a legitimate son of the King and thus give him a claim prior to the King's Catholic brother, The Duke of York. However, this alleged proof was never produced. Thus, people who were ready to back the Duke of Monmouth's claim to the throne (and risk their lives in so doing) were expected to take the Black box and its contents on faith without having ever seen them.

I'm not convinced that this is connected with the use of the term black box to describe and analyse systems. As the disambiguation at the top of the page says This article is about the abstract concept of black box systems. If a source makes the connection then it could be a different thing, but as it stands this looks more like an entry/etymology for Wiktionary, not for this article. SpinningSpark 16:06, 12 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I feel very strongly that there is more than etymology involved here. The 17th Century use of the term very much implied something whose contents one has to take on faith without ever seeing it - at the time the Royalists made very much fun of it. There were quite a lot of British academics involved in the early development of computers, and taking the term "Black box" out of the past and giving it the present meaning seems to me very much the kind of joke which might have appealed to such British academics. But I concede that my gut feeling on this does not meet the criteria of Wikipedia, and a concrete evidence is needed. So I am content to leave this here, I will try to find the needed proof, and I invite anyone interested to join the search. Blanche of King's Lynn (talk) 20:56, 18 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Are Black Boxes Strictly Deterministic?

@Spinningspark: suggested that black boxes (in engineering) are strictly deterministic and not statistical. I'd not heard this before and thought the term was more general. Can Spinningspark, or anyone else, find a source that settles whether statistical systems can be viewed as black boxes? Thanks. Jamgoodman (talk) 16:35, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No, I didn't say black boxes were always deterministic, just that they generally are. There may well be a place to discuss statistical black boxes in this article, and note that I left in the "see also" which I would not have done if I really felt it did not belong. My reason for reverting is that putting the link in the lead makes it look as if statistical behaviour is part of the definition of black boxes and stimulus/response analysis is always statistical, neither of which is true.

I am further concerned that the stimulus–response model page is largely concerned with models to output an expectation value. To my mind, such models do not amount to a black box as understood by systems engineers. I won't deny that some systems have a non-deterministic statistical spread of output. But a black box model is a device that can be bolted in in place of the real system and behave exactly the same. The black box in a system needs to model the stochastic process and output values with a probability distribution that match that process, not output the expectation value. SpinningSpark 17:29, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Spinningspark: Thanks for your response, I'll consider how to edit the stimulus response page and what to discuss on the black box page, and get back to you. I'd had the same query about whether the stimulus response page was really about black boxes - I get the impression the inclusion of the black box mention was erroneous. Also, in future if you could use "{{reply to| X }" to format replies, that'd be great. Otherwise I don't get a notification and don't know that you've responded. Cheers, Jam Jamgoodman (talk) 22:28, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Jamgoodman: you should watchlist pages you have opened a discussion on, at least for a while. I'm not claiming that describing the S-R model as a "black box" is incorrect - I don't know whether it is or not. But the current S-R page is not describing black boxes as they are defined on this page. It is a different meaning of the term from what we are discussing here. SpinningSpark 22:45, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Noted your advice about watchlisting. And, at the very least, if we could find a standardisation of the term it would be satisfying to clear it up for posterity. I don't know whether the stimulus response model constitutes a black box either but I think 'being able to replace the system with the model' seems like a valid criterion for a black box. Otherwise, nearly all mathematical and statistical models would be black boxes! Jamgoodman (talk) 22:56, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

More references

find some about "black box in Signal Processing" at PMC search-1. Examples: PMC2590158 and PMC7340930.

find some about "black box in Thermodynamics" at PMC search-2. Examples: PMC2786942 and PMC5267413.

... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.81.201.3 (talk) 11:30, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To pass a value by reference and avoid

How can we pass a value by reference and avoid that the callee modifies it in C++ 105.160.85.30 (talk) 09:02, 11 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting how there are no citations in the introduction section

So much of WP is policed or "patrolled," to use one editors on words who reverted one my my edits two weeks ago. It's really fascinating or curious to notice how certain articles need no justification that they info is based on a source and not original research. Hmm. Makes you think. sheridanford (talk) 15:48, 22 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:LEADCITE. Johnuniq (talk) 04:28, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]