ABOUT INTRO CYBERNETICS

Posted by: lizwang on: July 20, 2008

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Cybernetics was defined by Norbert Wiener, in his book of that title, as the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Stafford Beer called it the science of effective organization and Gordon Pask extended it to include information flows "in all media" from stars to brains. It includes the study of feedback, black boxes and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organizations including self-organization. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks. 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".

The most recent definition has been proposed by Louis Kauffman, President of the American Society for Cybernetics, "Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves".

The term cybernetics stems from the Greek Κυβερνήτης (kybernetes, steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder — the same root as government). Cybernetics is a broad field of study, but the essential goal of cybernetics is to understand and define the functions and processes of systems. Studies of this field are all ultimately means of examining different forms of systems and applying what is known to make artificial systems, such as business management, more efficient and effective.

Concepts studied by cyberneticists include, but are not limited to: learning, cognition, adaption, social control, emergence, communication, efficiency, efficacy and interconnectivity. These concepts are studied by other subjects such as engineering and biology, but in cybernetics these are removed from the context of the individual organism or device.

Other fields of study which have influenced or been influnced by cybernetics include game theory; system theory (a mathematical counterpart to cybernetics); psychology, especially neuropsychology, behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology; and philosophy.

The word cybernetics was first used in the context of "the study of self-governance" 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 word "cybernétique" was also used in 1834 by the physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) to denote the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge.

The first artificial automatic regulatory system, a water clock, was invented by the mechanician Ktesibios. In his water clocks, water flowed from a source such as a holding tank into a reservoir, then from the reservoir to the mechanisms of the clock. Ktesibios’s device used a cone-shaped float to monitor the level of the water in its reservoir and adjust the rate of flow of the water accordingly to maintain a constant level of water in the reservoir, so that it neither overflowed nor was allowed to run dry. This was the first artificial truly automatic self-regulatory device that required no outside intervention between the feedback and the controls of the mechanism. Although they did not refer to this concept by the name of Cybernetics (they considered it a field of engineering), Ktesibios and others such as Heron and Su Song are considered to be some of the first to study cybernetic principles.

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 centripetal feedback valve for controlling the speed of the engine. Alfred Russel Wallace identified this as the principle of evolution in his famous 1858 paper. In 1868 James Clerk Maxwell published a theoretical article on governors, one of the first to discuss and refine the principles of self-regulating devices.

Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology and neuroscience in the 1940s. Electronic control systems originated with the 1927 work of Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer Harold S. Black on using negative feedback to control amplifiers. The ideas are also related to the biological work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in General Systems Theory.

Early applications of negative feedback in electronic circuits included the control of gun mounts and radar antenna during World War Two. Jay Forrester, a graduate student at the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT during WWII working with Gordon S. Brown to develop electronic control systems for the U.S. Navy later applied these ideas to social organizations such as corporations and cities as an original organizer of the MIT School of Industrial Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Forrester is known as the founder of System Dynamics.

W. Edwards Deming, the Total Quality Management guru for whom Japan named its top post-WWII industrial prize, was an intern at Bell Telephone Labs in 1927 and may have been influenced by network theory. Deming made "Understanding Systems" one of the four pillars of what he described as "Profound Knowledge" in his book "The New Economics."

Numerous papers spearheaded the coalescing of the field. In 1935 Russian physiologist P.K. Anokhin published a book in which the concept of feedback ("back efferentation") was studied. The Romanian scientist Ştefan Odobleja published Psychologie consonantiste (Paris, 1938), describing many cybernetic principles. 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.

In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France. The event was organized by the Bourbaki, a French scientific society, and 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. The name cybernetics was coined to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and was popularized through his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (1948). In the UK this became the focus for the Ratio Club.

In the early 1940’s John von Neumann, although better known for his work in mathematics and computer science, did contribute a unique and unusual addition to the world of cybernetics: Von Neumann cellular automata, and their logical follow up the Von Neumann Universal Constructor. The result of these deceptively simple thought-experiments was the concept of self replication which cybernetics adopted as a core concept. The concept that the same properties of genetic reproduction applied to social memes, living cells, and even computer viruses is further proof of the somewhat surprising universality of cybernetic study.

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.

For a time during the past 20 years, the field of cybernetics followed a boom-bust cycle of becoming more and more dominated by the subfields of artificial intelligence and machine-biological interfaces (ie. cyborgs) and when this research fell out of favor, the field as a whole fell from grace. Recent endeavors into the true focus of cybernetics, systems of control and emergent behavior, by such related fields as Game Theory (the analysis of group interaction), systems of feedback in evolution, and Metamaterials (the study of materials with properties beyond the newtonian properties of their constituent atoms), have lead to a revived interest in this increasingly relevant field.

Cybernetics is an earlier but still-used generic term for many subject matters. These subjects also extend into many others areas of science, but are united in their study of control of systems.

Pure cybernetics studies systems of control as a concept, attempting to discover the basic principals underlying such things as Artificial intelligence, Control systems, Emergence, Learning organization, New Cybernetics, Second-order cybernetics, Interactions of Actors Theory, Conversation Theory.

In Biology: Cybernetics in biology is the study of cybernetic systems present in biological organisms, primarily focusing on how animals adapt to their environment, and how information in the form of genes is passed from generation to generation. There is also a secondary focus on cyborgs. Bioengineering, Biocybernetics, Bionics, Homeostasis, Medical cybernetics, Synthetic Biology.

In Complexity Science: Complexity Science attempts to analyze the nature of complex systems, and the reasons behind their unusual properties.

In Computer Science: Computer science directly applies the concepts of cybernetics to the control of devices and the analysis of information. Decision support system, Cellular automaton, Simulation.

In Engineering: Cybernetics in engineering is used to analyze cascading failures and System Accidents, in which the small errors and imperfections in a system can generate disasters. Other topics studied include: Adaptive systems, Engineering cybernetics, Ergonomics, Biomedical engineering, Systems engineering.

In Management: Entrepreneurial cybernetics, Management cybernetics, Organizational cybernetics, Operations research, Systems engineering.

In Mathematics: Mathematical Cybernetics focuses on the factors of information, interaction of parts in systems, and the structure of systems. Dynamical system, Information theory, Systems theory.

In Psychology: Psycho-Cybernetics, Systemic psychology.

In Sociology: By examining group behavior through the lens of cybernetics, sociology seeks the reasons for such spontaneous events as smart mobs and riots, as well as how communities develop rules, such as  etiquette, by consensus without formal discussion. Memetics, Sociocybernetics, Affect Control Theory explains role behavior, emotions, and labeling theory in terms of homeostatic maintenance of sentiments associated with cultural categories.