Black box

This article is about the abstract concept of black box systems. For black boxes in aircraft, see Flight recorder. For other uses, see Black box (disambiguation).
Black box systems
System
Black box, Oracle machine
Methods and techniques
Black-box testing, Blackboxing
Related techniques
Feed forward, Obfuscation, Pattern recognition, White box, White-box testing, Gray-box testing, System identification
Fundamentals
A priori information, Control systems, Open systems, Operations research, Thermodynamic systems

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.[1][2] 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 analyze 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").

  1. ^ Bunge, Mario (October 1963). "A General Black Box Theory". Philosophy of Science. 30 (4): 346–358. doi:10.1086/287954. ISSN 0031-8248.
  2. ^ Haskel-Ittah, Michal (April 2023). "Explanatory black boxes and mechanistic reasoning". Journal of Research in Science Teaching. 60 (4): 915–933. Bibcode:2023JRScT..60..915H. doi:10.1002/tea.21817. ISSN 0022-4308.