[From Bruce Abbott (2014.01.13.1450 EST)]
If you plan to participate in the upcoming seminar on Living Control Systems III: The Fact of Control (AKA LCS III), hosted on CSGnet by Rick Marken and David Goldstein, you will need a copy of the book and access to the demonstration programs that are included on the CD that comes with the book. In the interest of disseminating the demos widely, Bill Powers posted the demo programs on a website (http://BillPCT.org ), where you can download the entire collection as a self-extracting zip file. The programs were developed for the PC but will run on a Mac if the Mac has PC-emulation software – or so I’ve been assured.
Recently I’ve updated two of the demos, LiveBlock and InvtPend. The LiveBlock update fixes a minor problem with the scrolling graph. The InvtPend update changes the control system that operates the inverted pendulum from a five-level system to one involving only four levels. This change was made because Richard Kennaway’s mathematical Appendix described the 4-level system and I wanted the demo to conform to that description. In addition, as Richard pointed out in a recent post on CSGnet, the 4-level system eliminates a bob position error that persists in the steady state with the 5-level model, as Rupert Young recently pointed out.
I have created an alternate website where I am making these demos TEMPORARILY available for download for the duration of the seminar. These include the new revisions, the remaining demos that have not been revised, and a “bonus” demo – a slightly modified version of the inverted pendulum program that is capable of inverting the pendulum from a hanging-down position. (The original version, InvtPend, is not capable of this.)
You can download these demos individually from the following website:
https://sites.google.com/site/perceptualcontroldemos/
Just download each folder to a folder of your choosing on your computer (you might want to create one called, e.g., LCS III Demos), then unzip each demo file into its own subfolder.
Each program was written in the Delphi programming language (a descendant of Borland Turbo Pascal with Objects). Each program file includes the executable file (file extension .exe); after unzipping the file, just double-click on the .exe file to execute it. All Delphi source code is also included. I have tried to make the source code self-documenting, so even if you are not familiar with Delphi, you should be able to figure out how the program does what it does, just by reading the source. Source code has the .pas extension; even if you don’t have the Delphi programming environment you can still read these by opening them in a text editor such as NotePad.
If you have an older, numbered version of Delphi (e.g., Delphi 6), you should be able to compile the program if you open the project using the file with the .dpr (for Delphi Project) file compile the program. For later versions of Delphi (e.g., Delphi XE), use the file with the .dproj extension or, if that does not exist, the .dpr file.
Of course, it’s not necessary to have your own Delphi Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to run the demo, as I’ve provided the executable file within the folder!
Bruce