Cybernetics

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Cybernetics is the study of feedback and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organisations. The term cybernetics stems from the Greek Κυβερνήτης (kybernetes, steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder — the same root as government). It is an earlier but still-used generic term for many of the subject matters that are increasingly subject to specialization under the headings of adaptive systems, artificial intelligence, complex systems, complexity theory, control systems, decision support systems, dynamical systems, information theory, learning organizations, mathematical systems theory, operations research, simulation, and systems engineering.

A more philosophical definition, suggested in 1956 by Louis Couffignal, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, characterizes cybernetics as "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action".

Contents 1 History 2 References 3 See also 3.1 Related fields 3.2 Related topics 4 External links

History

Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, logic modeling, and neuroscience in the 1940s. The name cybernetics was coined by Norbert Wiener to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and was popularized through his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (1948).

The word cybernetics ('cybernétique') had, ostensibly unbeknownst to Wiener, also been used in 1834 by the physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) to denote the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge. It was also used by Plato in The Laws to signify the governance of people. The words govern and governor are related to the same Greek root through the Latin cognates gubernare and gubernator.

The study of teleological mechanisms (from the Greek τέλος or telos for end, goal, or purpose) in machines with corrective feedback dates from as far back as the late 1700s when James Watt's steam engine was equipped with a governor, a centrifugal feedback valve for controlling the speed of the engine. In 1868 James Clerk Maxwell published a theoretical article on governors. In 1935 Russian physiologist P.K. Anokhin published a book in which the concept of feedback ("back afferentation") was studied. The Romanian scientist Ştefan Odobleja published Psychologie consonantiste (Paris, 1938), describing many cybernetic principles. In the 1940s the study and mathematical modelling of regulatory processes became a continuing research effort and two key articles were published in 1943. These papers were "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow; and the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.

Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as W. Ross Ashby and W. Grey Walter. Walter was one of the first to build autonomous robots as an aid to the study of animal behaviour. Together with the US and UK, an important geographical locus of early cybernetics was France, where Wiener's book was first published.

In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France, and organized by the bourbakian mathematician, Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899-1983), uncle of the world-famous mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot.

During this stay in France, Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the unifying character of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of Brownian motion and in telecommunication engineering. The following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism cybernetics into his scientific theory. In the UK this became the focus for the Ratio Club.

Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems (such as a regulated steam engine) and human institutions in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).

While not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster, was a major center of cybernetic research for almost 20 years, beginning in 1958.

References

• Ashby, W.R. (1956), Introduction to Cybernetics. Methuen, London, UK. PDF text.

• Bluma, Lars (2005), Norbert Wiener und die Entstehung der Kybernetik im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Münster.

• Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) Cybernetic Organism, Living Matter over cybernetic tissue

• Couffignal, Louis, "Essai d’une définition générale de la cybernétique", The First International Congress on Cybernetics, Namur, Belgium, June 26-29, 1956, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1958, pp. 46-54.

• Heims, Steve J. (1980), John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, 3. Aufl., Cambridge.

• Heims, Steve J. (1993), Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America. The Cybernetics Group, 1946-1953, Cambridge University Press, London, UK.

• Heylighen F., and Joslyn C. (2001), "Cybernetics and Second Order Cybernetics", in: R.A. Meyers (ed.), Encyclopedia of Physical Science & Technology (3rd ed.), Vol. 4, (Academic Press, New York), p. 155-170.

• Ilgauds, Hans Joachim (1980), Norbert Wiener, Leipzig.

• Masani, P. Rustom (1990), Norbert Wiener 1894-1964, Basel.

• Medina, Eden, "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile." Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006):571-606.

• Pangaro, Paul (1990), "Cybernetics — A Definition", Eprint.

• Patten, B.C., and Odum, E.P. (1981), "The Cybernetic Nature of Ecosystems", The American Naturalist 118, 886-895.

• Plato, "Alcibiades 1", W.R.M. Lamb (trans.), pp. 93–223 in Plato, Volume 12, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1927.

• von Foerster, Heinz (1995), "Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics", Eprint.

• Norbert Wiener (1948), Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Paris, Hermann et Cie - MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

See also

Related fields

• Biological cybernetics
• Biomedical engineering
• Engineering cybernetics
• Management science
• Medical cybernetics
• Sociocybernetics

Related topics

Artificial intelligence Artificial life Automation Complex systems Connectionism Decision theory Gaia theory/Earth System Science Game theory Information theory Intelligence amplification

Network theory (diktyology) Perceptual control theory Project Cybersyn Second order cybernetics Systems biology Semiotics Semiotic information theory Synergetics Systems theory Cybernetics and Systems Theory

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