CONCEPT
Internal Models (Holland)
Holland's formal framework for the compressed, predictive representations that adaptive agents carry — the maps that let them anticipate outcomes, evaluate alternatives, and respond to novel situations, distinguished into tacit and overt varieties.
Every complex adaptive agent carries an internal model: a compressed representation of its environment that enables anticipation, evaluation, and novel response. The model's power lies in its incompleteness — a map as detailed as the territory would be useless. Holland distinguished tacit models, embedded in the agent's structure and operating without conscious deliberation, from overt models, explicit representations that can be manipulated and communicated. The bacterium's chemoreceptors encode a tacit model. A weather forecast is an overt one. Every adaptive agent carries both. The quality of AI collaboration depends on the alignment of two internal models — the human's model of what they need, and the machine's model of what language can produce. When they align, emergence appears. When they misalign, output is generic, plausible, and empty.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The art of effective AI collaboration — what the industry inadequately calls prompt engineering — is, in Holland's framework, the art of aligning two internal