History Determined

Attribute of systems whose behavior is specified or can be understood better by looking into its past history. In contrast to state determined systems, predictability of the future states of such systems improves when relying not only on their current state but on a finite sequence of states preceding them. E.g., higher-than-first-order markov chains (see memory ). It can be argued that all history determined systems are incompletely observed STATE DETERMINED systems and that the recourse into history has heuristic value. (Krippendorff )