Artichoke production in Italy Artichoke production in Italy Artichoke production in Italy has a long history. Italy is the world's largest producer of artichokes. With Spain and France, the three countries produce more than 80% of the world's artichokes. There are two theories as to its origin: artichokes may have come from the Levant, derived from the cardoon or thistle through a cross-fertilization process, while others attribute it to the work of Italian horticulturists. The first record of artichoke cultivation in Italy was during the fifteenth century in Naples, where it was considered a new food species. In 1466, Filippo Strozzi brought the first
Variety (cybernetics) of "possible" states of a system, or of an element of a system", "cf." Ludwig Boltzmann's Wahrscheinlichkeit. Beer restates the Law of Requisite Variety as "Variety absorbs variety". Stated more simply the logarithmic measure of variety represents the minimum number of choices (by binary chop) needed to resolve uncertainty. Beer used this to allocate the management resources necessary to maintain process viability. Variety is one of nine requisites that are required by an ethical regulator. In general a description of the required inputs and outputs is established then encoded with the minimum variety necessary. The mapping of input bits to