Dictionary:
cy·ber·net·ics (sī'bər-nĕt'ĭks)  |
The theoretical study of communication and control processes in biological, mechanical, and electronic systems, especially the comparison of these processes in biological and artificial systems.
[From Greek kubernētēs, governor, from kubernān, to govern.]
cybernetic cy'ber·net'ic adj.| Sci-Tech Encyclopedia: Cybernetics |
The study of communication and control within and between humans, machines, organizations, and society. This is a modern definition of the term cybernetics, which was first utilized by N. Wiener in 1948 to designate a broad subject area he defined as “control and communication in the animal and the machine.” A distinguishing feature of this broad field is the use of feedback information to adapt or steer the entity toward a goal. When this feedback signal is such as to cause changes in the structure or parameters of the system itself, it appears to be self-organizing. See also Adaptive control.
Wiener developed the statistical methods of autocorrelation, prediction, and filtering of time-series data to provide a mathematical description of both biological and physical phenomena. The use of filtering to remove unwanted information or noise from the feedback signal mimics the selectivity shown in biological systems in which imprecise information from a diversity of sensors can be accommodated so that the goal can still be reached. See also Estimation theory; Homeostasis; Stochastic control theory.
| Modern Science: cybernetics |
The general study of control and communication systems in living organisms and machines, especially the mathematical analysis of the flow of information. The term cybernetics was coined by Norbert Wiener, an American mathematician of the twentieth century.
| Computer Desktop Encyclopedia: cybernetics |
The comparative study of human and machine processes in order to understand their similarities and differences. It often refers to machines that imitate human behavior. The term was coined by Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century. See AI and robot.
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| World of the Body: cybernetics |
Cybernetics is the science of control. Its name, appropriately suggested by the mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), is derived from the Greek for ‘steersman’, pointing to the essence of cybernetics as the study and design of devices for maintaining stability, or for homing in on a goal or target. Its central concept is feedback. Since the ‘devices’ may be living or man-made, cybernetics bridges biology and engineering.
Stability of the human body is achieved by its static geometry and, very differently, by its dynamic control. A statue of a human being has to have a large base or it topples over. It falls when the centre of mass is vertically outside the base of the feet. Living people make continuous corrections to maintain themselves standing. Small deviations of posture are signalled by sensory signals (proprioception) from nerve fibres in the muscles and around the joint capsules of the ankles and legs, and by the otoliths (the organs of balance in the inner ear). Corrections of posture are the result of dynamic feedback from these senses, to maintain dynamic stability. When walking towards a target, such as the door of a room, deviations from the path are noted, mainly visually, and corrected from time to time during the movement, until the goal is reached. The key to this process is continuous correction of the output system by signals representing detected errors of the output, known as ‘negative feedback’. The same principle, often called servo-control, is used in engineering, in order to maintain the stability of machinery and to seek and find goals, with many applications such as guided missiles and autopilots.
The principles of feedback apply to the body's regulation of temperature, blood pressure, and so on. Though the principles are essentially the same as in engineering, for living organisms dynamic stability by feedback is often called ‘homeostasis’, following W. B. Cannon's pioneering book The wisdom of the body (1932). In the history of engineering, there are hints of the principle back to ancient Greek devices, such as self-regulating oil lamps. From the Middle Ages the tail vane of windmills, continuously steering the sails into the veering wind, are well-known early examples of guidance by feedback. A more sophisticated system reduced the weight of the upper grinding stone when the wind fell, to keep the mill operating optimally in changing conditions. Servo-systems using feedback can make machines remarkably life-like. The first feedback device to be mathematically described was the rotary governor, used by James Watt to keep the rate of steam engines constant with varying loads.
Servo-systems suffer characteristic oscillations when the output overshoots the target, as occurs when the feedback is too slow or too weak to correct the output. Changing the ‘loop gain’ (i.e. the magnitude of correction resulting from a particular feedback signal) increases tremor for machines and organisms. It is tempting to believe that ‘intention tremor’ of patients who have suffered damage to the cerebellum is caused by a change in the characteristics of servo control.
Dynamic control requires the transmission of information. Concepts of information are included in cybernetics, especially following Claud Shannon's important mathematical analysis in 1949. It does not, however, cover digital computing. Cybernetic systems are usually analogue, and computing is described with very different concepts. Early Artificial Intelligence (AI) was analogue-based (reaching mental goals by correcting abstract errors) and there has recently been a return to analogue computing systems, with self-organizing ‘neural nets’.
A principal pioneer of cybernetic concepts of brain function was the Cambridge psychologist Kenneth Craik, who described thinking in terms of physical models analogous to physiological processes. Craik pointed to engineering examples, such as Kelvin's tide predictor, which predicted tides with a system of pulleys and levers. The essential cybernetic philosophy of neurophysiology is that the brain functions by such principles as feedback and information, represented by electro-chemical, physical activity in the nervous system. It is assumed that this creates mind: so, in principle, and no doubt in practice, machines can be fully mindfu.
— Richard L. Gregory
Bibliography
See also balance; homeostasis; proprioception; vestibular system.
| Word Origin: cybernetics |
We who spend so much time in the cyberworld owe it all, or at least the cyber-, to the American scientist Norbert Wiener. For his 1948 book Cybernetics he derived the prefix from classical Greek kubernGtGs, meaning "one who steers," and added the suffix -ics to indicate that it was a science like physics or mathematics. Wiener, a mathematician, proposed cybernetics as the study of systems of control and communication, in particular those of the human mind and the computer. The analogy between mind and machine introduced by cybernetics made possible the development of primitive computers into machines that imitate human modes of thinking.
As computers gradually extended their influence, so did cyber-, as a prefix having to do with computers and electronic communication. There was the cyborg of the 1960s, an imagined "cybernetic organism" that was part human and part computer. There was cyberphobia, "fear of computers," in the 1980s. And in the 1990s practically anything could have cyber- in its name if it involved computers or the Internet. For the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, John and Adele Algeo in 1994 and 1995 collected well over one hundred cyber words from cyberbabe to Cyberzine--including cyberboor, cyberchat, cyber-community, cybercop (government monitor of Internet communications), cybercrime, cybernaut (adventurer on the Internet), cybernut, cyberporn, cybrarian (librarian who uses computers), and cyberscam.
With his proposal to put computers within the reach of every schoolchild, President Clinton could be said to be building a cyberbridge to the twenty-first century.
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: cybernetics |
For more information on cybernetics, visit Britannica.com.
| Philosophy Dictionary: cybernetics |
(Greek, kyberneētēs, pilot, governor) The science of communication and control systems.
| US History Encyclopedia: Cybernetics |
In a groundbreaking book in 1948 the mathematician Norbert Wiener described cybernetics as "the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine." Wiener derived the term from the Greek word kybernetes (steersman). Wiener became interested in the topic of cybernetics during World War II while working with a colleague, Julian Bigelow, on improving the accuracy of a radar-guided antiaircraft gun. For several years, cybernetics greatly influenced research on Artificial Intelligence. Cybernetics centers on feedback mechanisms, or methods by which information on the state of an organism or machine is fed back into the organism or machine in order to direct further changes. A biological example of feedback is the way in which warm-blooded animals automatically regulate their temperatures, keeping them within a narrow range of acceptable values by using a variety of mechanisms that lose or retain heat.
By the early 2000s, cybernetics—often known as systems science—comprised a wide range of interdisciplinary research interests and applied sciences that extended well beyond Wiener's original scope of inquiry, encompassing research in such varied realms as neural networks, chaos theory, artificial intelligence, dynamical systems, and the study of other complex, adaptive systems. The field gained its unity by emphasizing the connectedness and interactions of the diverse parts of a system, in contrast to the more traditional analytic approach that focused on comprehending systems by breaking them down into their component parts.
Bibliography
Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1961.
———. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York: Avon Books, 1967. The original edition was published Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950.
—Vincent Kiernan/C. W.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: cybernetics |
Bibliography
See N. Wiener, Cybernetics (rev. ed. 1961) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1967); F. H. Fuchs, The Brain as a Computer (1973).
| Veterinary Dictionary: cybernetics |
The science of communication and control in the animal and in the machine.
| Wikipedia: Cybernetics |
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory. Both in its origins and in its evolution in the second-half of the 20th century, cybernetics is equally applicable to physical and social (that is, language-based) systems.
Cybernetics is preeminent when the system under scrutiny is involved in a closed signal loop, where action by the system in an environment causes some change in the environment and that change is manifest to the system via information, or feedback, that causes the system to adapt to new conditions: the system changes its behaviour. This "circular causal" relationship is necessary and sufficient for a cybernetic perspective.[citation needed]
Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology in the 1940s, often attributed to the Macy Conferences.
Other fields of study which have influenced or been influenced by cybernetics include game theory, system theory (a mathematical counterpart to cybernetics), sociology, psychology (especially neuropsychology, behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology), philosophy, and architecture.[1]
Contents |
The term cybernetics stems from the Greek κυβερνήτης (kybernētēs, 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 that have goals and that participate in circular, causal chains that move from action to sensing to comparison with desired goal, and again to action. Studies in cybernetics provide a means for examining the design and function of any system, including social systems such as business management and organizational learning, including for the purpose of making them more efficient and effective.
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 [2]. 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" [3]. 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" [4].
Concepts studied by cyberneticists (or, as some prefer, cyberneticians) 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 influenced by cybernetics include game theory; system theory (a mathematical counterpart to cybernetics); psychology, especially neuropsychology, behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology; philosophy; anthropology; and even architecture.[citation needed]
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 centrifugal 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. Jakob von Uexküll applied the feedback mechanism via his model of functional cycle (Funktionskreis) in order to explain animal behaviour and the origins of meaning in general.
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 WWII. 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 afferentation") was studied. 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 (Hermann & Cie, Paris, 1948). In the UK this became the focus for the Ratio Club.
In the early 1940s 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 30 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.
In the 1970s new cybernetics has emerged in multiple fields, first in biology. Some biologists influenced by cybernetic concepts from Maturana, Varela and Atlan, according to Dupuy (1986) "realized that the cybernetic metaphors of the program upon which molecular biology had been based rendered a conception of the autonomy of the living being impossible. Consequently, these thinkers were led to invent a new cybernetics, one more suited to the organizations which mankind discovers in nature - organizations he has not himself invented"[5]. It however remained a debate in the 1980s whether or not the new insides of new cybernetics could be projected on social forms of organization.[5]
In political science, Project Cybersyn attempted to introduce a cybernetically controlled economy during the early 1970s. In the 1980s, according to Harries-Jones (1988) "unlike its predecessor, the new cybernetics concerns itself with the interaction of autonomous political actors and subgroups, and the practical and reflexive consciousness of the subjects who produce and reproduce the structure of a political community. A dominant consideration is that of recursiveness, or self-reference of political action both with regards to the expression of political consciousness and with the ways in which systems build upon themselves".[6]
One characteristic of the emerging new cybernetics considered in that time by Geyer and van der Zouwen, according to Bailey (1994), was "that it views information as constructed and reconstructed by an individual interacting with the environment. This provides an epistemological foundation of science, by viewing it as observer-dependent. Another characteristic of the new cybernetics is its contribution towards bridging the "micro-macro gap". That is, it links the individual with the society"[7] An other charateristic noted was the "transition from classical cybernetics to the new cybernetics [that] involves a transition from classical problems to new problems. These shifts in thinking involve, among others, (a) a change from emphasis on the system being steered to the system doing the steering, and the factor which guides the steering decisions.; and (b) new emphasis on communication between several systems which are trying to steer each other"[7]. The work of Gregory Bateson was also strongly influenced by cybernetics.
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 led to a revived interest in this increasingly relevant field.[2]
Cybernetics is an earlier but still-used generic term for many types of subject matter. 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 principles underlying such things as
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[8]. There is also a secondary focus on cyborgs.
Complexity Science attempts to analyze the nature of complex systems, and the reasons behind their unusual properties.
Computer science directly applies the concepts of cybernetics to the control of devices and the analysis of information.
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:
Mathematical Cybernetics focuses on the factors of information, interaction of parts in systems, and the structure of systems.
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. Affect Control Theory explains role behavior, emotions, and labeling theory in terms of homeostatic maintenance of sentiments associated with cultural categories. The most comprehensive attempt ever made in the social sciences to increase cybernetics in an generalized theory of society was made by Talcott Parsons. These and other cybernetic models in sociology are reviewed in a book edited by McClelland and Fararo[9].
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| Translations: Cybernetics |
Dansk (Danish)
n. - kybernetik
Nederlands (Dutch)
cybernetica
Français (French)
n. - cybernétique
Deutsch (German)
n. - Kybernetik, (Wissenschaft von Steuerungs- und Regelvorgängen)
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. pl. - κυβερνητική (μηχανική)
Italiano (Italian)
cibernetica
Português (Portuguese)
n. pl. - cibernética (f)
Español (Spanish)
n. - cibernética
Svenska (Swedish)
n. pl. - cybernetik
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
人工头脑学, 神经机械学, 控制学
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. pl. - 人工頭腦學, 神經機械學, 控制學
n. - 人工頭腦學, 神經機械學, 控制學
한국어 (Korean)
n. pl. - 인공 두뇌학
n. - 제어와 전달의 이론 및 기술을 비교 연구하는 학문
العربيه (Arabic)
(الجمع) علم التحكم و السيطرة
עברית (Hebrew)
n. pl. - מדע התקשורת ומערכות השליטה האוטומטיות של אנשים ומכונות, קיברנטיקה
n. - מדע התקשורת ומערכות השליטה האוטומטיות של אנשים ומכונות, קיברנטיקה
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 | Automation |
| balance |
| homeostasis |
 | Who was Known as the father of cybernetics? Read answer... |
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 | What is a cybernetic system? |
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| What are the cons of cybernetics? |
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