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Concept
Black box
Summary
In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is a system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). The term can be used to refer to many inner workings, such as those of a transistor, an engine, an algorithm, the human brain, or an institution or government.
To analyse an open system with a typical "black box approach", only the behavior of the stimulus/response will be accounted for, to infer the (unknown) box. The usual representation of this black box system is a data flow diagram centered in the box.
The opposite of a black box is a system where the inner components or logic are available for inspection, which is most commonly referred to as a white box (sometimes also known as a "clear box" or a "glass box").
The modern meaning of the term "black box" seems to have entered the English language around 1945. In electronic circuit theory the process of network synthesis from transfer functions, which led to electronic circuits being regarded as "black boxes" characterized by their response to signals applied to their ports, can be traced to Wilhelm Cauer who published his ideas in their most developed form in 1941. Although Cauer did not himself use the term, others who followed him certainly did describe the method as black-box analysis. Vitold Belevitch puts the concept of black-boxes even earlier, attributing the explicit use of two-port networks as black boxes to Franz Breisig in 1921 and argues that 2-terminal components were implicitly treated as black-boxes before that.
In cybernetics, a full treatment was given by Ross Ashby in 1956. A black box was described by Norbert Wiener in 1961 as an unknown system that was to be identified using the techniques of system identification. He saw the first step in self-organization as being to be able to copy the output behavior of a black box. Many other engineers, scientists and epistemologists, such as Mario Bunge, used and perfected the black box theory in the 1960s.
Official source
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