Cybernetics - Definition and Overview

For other uses, see Cybernetics (disambiguation).

Cybernetics is a theory of the communication and control of regulatory feedback. The term cybernetics stems from the Greek Κυβερνήτης (meaning steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder). Cybernetics is the discipline that studies communication and control in living beings and in the machines built by humans.

A more philosophical definition, suggested in 1958 by Louis Couffignal, one of the pioneers of cybernetics in the 1930s, considers cybernetics as "the art of assuring efficiency of action" (see external links for reference).

History

The word cybernetics is found in the Gorgias by Plato, it also had a French usage, though Norbert Wiener, who later developed the modern form, wasn't aware that the physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) had already used it for his classification of the sciences to define "how the citizens can enjoy a peaceful time".

In the late 1700s James Watt's steam engine had a governor, a simple feedback mechanism, a cornerstone of cybernetic theory. In 1868 James Clerk Maxwell published an article on governors. In the 1940s the study of regulatory processes became a continuing research effort and two key articles were published in 1943 ("Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow and "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts).

Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Norbert Wiener (in Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and machine, 1948) and others such as William Ross Ashby and Grey Walter. While cybernetics is generally thought to have American origins, the book itself was actually published in France where information theory was hailed as a new general discipline which included cybernetics. When asked why he had chosen the name cybernetics, Wiener replied, "I didn't know what else to call it."

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

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).

Cybernetics is somewhat erroneously associated in many people's minds with robotics, due to uses such as Douglas Adams's Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and the concept of a cyborg, a term first popularized by Clynes and Kline in 1960.

Scope

In scholarly terms, cybernetics is the study of systems and control in an abstracted sense — that is, it is not grounded in any empirical field. Its emphasis is on the functional relations that hold between the different parts of a system. These include in particular the transfer of information, and the circular relations that define feedback, self-organization, and autopoiesis. The main innovation brought about by cybernetics is an understanding of goal-directedness or purpose as a negative feedback loop which minimizes the deviation between the perceived situation and the desired situation (goal).

See also

• systems theory
• complex systems
• biological cybernetics
• medical cybernetics

References

• Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, (Hermann Editions in Paris; Cambridge: MIT Press,Wiley & Sons in NY 1948),
• Ashby, W. R. (1956) Introduction to Cybernetics. Methuen, London. (electronically republished at [1] (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf)).
• Heylighen F. & Joslyn C. (2001): "Cybernetics and Second Order Cybernetics (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Cybernetics-EPST.pdf)", in: R.A. Meyers (ed.), Encyclopedia of Physical Science & Technology (3rd ed.), Vol. 4 , (Academic Press, New York), p. 155-170.
• Manfred E. Clynes, and Nathan S. Kline, (1960) "Cyborgs and Space", Astronautics, September, pp. 26-27 and 74-75; reprinted in Gray, Mentor, and Figueroa-Sarriera, eds., The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 29-34.

External links

• Louis Couffignal's photos & documents (http://histm2.free.fr/H.Couffign.htm)
• Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/indexASC.html)
• Glossary Slideshow (136 slides) (http://www.gwu.edu/~asc/slide/s1.html)
• Principia Cybernetica Web (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html)
• Mindmap-based-page by Ragnar Heil (http://www.systems-thinking.de)
• The Cybernetics Society (http://www.cybsoc.org)
• The Systemic Approach : an introduction (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/nathalie.diaz/html/Approche%20syst.htm)
• Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France and the Soviet Union (http://www.infoamerica.org/documentos_word/shannon-wiener.htm)
• Medizinische Kybernetik | Medical Cybernetics (http://www.medical-cybernetics.de)
• Cybernetics category in the Open Encyclopedia Project (http://open-site.org/Science/Mathematics/Applied/Cybernetics/)
• Systemics and cybernetics in a historical perspective (pdf document) (http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~gossimit/ifsr/francois/papers/systemics_and_cybernetics_in_a_historical_perspective.pdf)

(more related pdf documents (http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~gossimit/ifsr/francois/papers/))

• Dr Jose Delgado / Cybernetic brain implants (http://earthops.net/klaatu/delgado.html)