The Information Transfer Required in Regulatory Processes

Several fundamental relations between regulation and informational quantities are given. These show that regulation is a phenomenon closely tied to the transinformation between the regulator and the system which might be called its opponent. Two basic types of regulators are distinguished. The first, error-controlled regulators, are shown to be essentially coding devices which operate by taking advantage of constraints in the input sequence. The second, cause-controlled regulators, are shown to be free of some limitations inherent in error-controlled regulators. The importance of the regulator's channel capacity in cause-controlled regulation is established.