In 1985, the co-inventor of Cybernetics Heinz von Foerster described an imaginary non-trivial machine, a black box with four buttons, four signals and a simple little mechanism inside. He said it was so complex that if you wanted to be able to predict what signal shows when pressing one of these buttons, you’d need to check against 102466 possible versions of the machine. Naturally he concluded that this was impossible for humans.
He was wrong. You can do it. We’ve built and tested it.
But you have to stop thinking in computational, linear ways. In this Little Black Box game, we have reduced the number of buttons and signals to three each, so instead of an hour or so, many can solve it in less than ten minutes. Levels 1 and 2 are here to let you experience ordered ways of how the box could be constructed. Level 3 is where the fun begins.