Project Cybersyn
Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines. The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer.
About Project Cybersyn in brief
Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that were linked to one mainframe computer. The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer. The system was most useful in October 1972, when about 40,000 striking truck drivers blocked the access streets that converged towards Santiago. After the CIA-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, Cyberyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed. The name in English is a portmanteau of the words \”cybernetics\” and \”synergy\”.
Since the name is not euphonic in Spanish, in that language the project was called Synco, both an initialism for the Spanish Sistema de INformación y COntrol, \”system of information and control\”, and a pun on the Spanish cinco, the number five, alluding to the five levels of Beer’s viable system model. There were four levels of control, with algedonic feedback. If one level of control did not remedy a problem in a certain interval, the higher level was notified. The results were discussed in the operation room and a top-level plan was made. Only one regularly used operational level was the one used by the Allende government. The software was called Bayesian Baystride, and used by 12 engineers in consultation with a team of 12 programmers.
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This page is based on the article Project Cybersyn published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 29, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
