This Chancy, Chancy, Chancy World | L. Rastrigin

In this post we will see This Chancy, Chancy, Chancy World By Leonard Rastrigin.

Have you ever sat down and thought about how often chance affects your life? If you have, then you probably realize that chance literally hits us from every side. We live in a world more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of chance than the wildest imagination could devise.Chance abounds in an endless variety of forms. Some darken our existence, confound our plans and prevent us from realizing our most cherished ambitions. Others do not affect us, while others still illuminate our lives with all the colours of the rainbow and bring happiness and success (eureka!).

But is it really worth talking about chance? What is there to say about it? Chance is chancy, and that’s that.
In fact there is a great deal we can say about chance and there is even more we can ask about it. For example: how does chaos arise? What is control? How should we act in circumstances involving chance? How can we come to terms with the difficulties that arise from chance obstacles in our lives? What is the Monte Carlo method? Why is learning necessary? What role does chance play in evolution and progress? How is it that our chancy, chancy, chancy world gets along quite well? Is it possible to make it better still? Answers to these and many other questions will be found in this book.

About the Author
LEONARD RASTRIGIN graduated in aircraft design from the Moscow Aeronautical Institute and, in 1960, presented his Ph.D. thesis on mechanics. He then made a 179-degree turn and ‘retreated’ into cybernetics, where he studied random search a new technique for finding optimum solutions to complex problems. Cybernetics brings him both joy and sorrow. His work in this field has gained him his doctorate and a professorship, and he is now Director of the only random search laboratory in the world. Here his task is to vindicate the claims of random search and to demonstrate its advantages in practical applications. Professor Rastrigin is a very busy man. Yet no sooner does he have a day off duty than he reaches for his pen. In the space of a few years he has written two monographs and over a hundred scientific articles. This Chancy, Chancy, Chancy World is his first book devoted to acquainting the general reader with his special field of study.

The book was translated from the Russian by R. H. M. Woodhouse and was first published by Mir Publishers in 1973, with a second reprint in1984. The present version is the 1984 one.

Many thanks to gnv64 for this book. PDF | Paginated | Bookmarked | 287 pages | 9.36 mb

Please post alternate links in the comments.

Contents:

INTRODUCTION
CONTENTS    4
What is chance?    10

 PART-1

CHANCE THE OBSTACLE        34

1. Change at the cradle of cybernetics    34
2. Control    38
3. The history of control stage one    60
4. The battle with chance interface    82
5. Alternatives risk and decision    126

PART-2-
WELCOME CHANCE    152

1. Sherlock holmes speak his mind at last    152
2. The monte carlo method    158
3. Chance in games.    176
4. Learning conditioned relexes and chance    184
5. Chance and recongnition    206
6. Chance selection and evolution    230
7. Self-adjustment    248
8. Seabch(path and wanderings)    266

Conclusion    284