Cybernetics

Cybernetics (from Ancient Greek. κυβερνητική "The Art of Management^") is the science of the general laws of receiving, storing, transforming and transmitting information in complex control systems, be they machines, living organisms or society.

The term "cybernetics" was originally introduced into scientific circulation by Ampere, who in his fundamental work "An Essay on the Philosophy of the Sciences, or an Analytical Exposition of the Natural Classification of All Human Knowledge", the first part of which was published in 1834, the second in 1843, defined cybernetics as the science of state management, which should provide citizens with a variety of benefits. In the modern sense, as the science of the general laws of the processes of control and transmission of information in machines, living organisms and society, the term was first proposed by Norbert Wiener in 1948^.

Cybernetics involves the study of feedback, black boxes, and derived concepts such as control and communication in living organisms, machines, and organizations, including self-organizations. It focuses on how something (digital, mechanical, or biological) processes, responds to, and changes or can be changed in order to better perform the first ^{two tasks.} Stafford Beer called it the science of effective organization, and Gordon Pask expanded the definition to include streams of information "from any source," from the stars to the brain.

According to another definition of cybernetics, proposed in 1956 by L. Cuffignal^{, one} of the pioneers of cybernetics, cybernetics is "the art of ensuring the effectiveness of ^action".

Another definition is proposed by Lewis Kaufman^{: "}Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and reproduce themselves."

According to Ozhegov's dictionary: "Cybernetics is the science of the general laws of the processes of control and transmission of information in machines, living organisms and society".

Cybernetic methods are used in the study of the case when the action of a system in the environment causes some change in the environment, and this change manifests itself on the system through feedback, which causes changes in the way the system behaves. In the study of these "feedback loops" lies the methods of cybernetics.

Modern cybernetics was born, including research in various fields of control systems, the theory of electrical circuits, mechanical engineering, mathematical modeling, mathematical logic, evolutionary biology, neurology, and anthropology. These studies appeared in 1940, mainly in the proceedings of scientists at the so-called Macy Conferences^.

Other fields of research that have influenced or influenced the development of cybernetics are control theory, game theory, systems theory (the mathematical equivalent of cybernetics), psychology (especially neuropsychology, behaviorism, cognitive psychology), and philosophy.

The object of cybernetics is all controlled systems. Systems that cannot be controlled in principle are not objects of study of cybernetics. Cybernetics introduces such concepts as the cybernetic approach, the cybernetic system. Cybernetic systems are considered abstractly, regardless of their material nature. Examples of cybernetic systems are automatic controllers in technology, computers, the human brain, biological populations, and human society. Each such system is a set of interrelated objects (elements of the system) capable of perceiving, remembering and processing information, as well as exchanging it. Cybernetics develops general principles for the creation of control systems and systems for the automation of mental work. The main technical means for solving the problems of cybernetics are computers. Therefore, the emergence of cybernetics as an independent science (N. Wiener, 1948) is associated with the creation of these machines in the 1940s, and the development of cybernetics in theoretical and practical aspects is associated with the progress of electronic computer technology.

In addition to the means of analysis, cybernetics uses powerful tools for the synthesis of solutions provided by the apparatuses of mathematical analysis, linear algebra, geometry of convex sets, probability theory and mathematical statistics, as well as more applied areas of mathematics, such as mathematical programming, econometrics, computer science and other derivatives Discipline.

The role of cybernetics is especially great in the psychology of work and in such branches of it as engineering psychology and the psychology of vocational education. Cybernetics is the science of optimal control of complex dynamic systems, which studies the general principles of control and communication that underlie the operation of systems of a wide variety of nature, from homing missiles and high-speed computers to a complex living organism. Management is the transfer of a controlled system from one state to another through the purposeful influence of the manager. Optimal control is the transfer of the system to a new state with the fulfillment of a certain criterion of optimality, for example, minimization of the cost of time, labor, matter or energy. A complex dynamic system is any real object whose elements are studied in such a high degree of interconnection and mobility that a change in one element leads to a change in others.

Cybernetics is an earlier, but still used, generic designation for many subjects. These subjects also extend into the field of many other sciences, but are combined in the study of systems management.

Pure cybernetics studies control systems as a concept, trying to discover its basic principles.

• Artificial intelligence
• Second-Order Cybernetics
• Computer Vision
• Control systems
• Emergence
• Learning Organizations
• New Cybernetics
• Interactions of Actors Theory
• Communication theory

Cybernetics in biology is the study of cybernetic systems in biological organisms, studying how animals adapt to their environment and how information in the form of genes can be passed on from generation to generation. There is also a second direction - cyborgs.

• Bioengineering
• Biological Cybernetics
• Bioinformatics
• Bionics
• Medical Cybernetics
• Neurocybernetics
• Homeostasis
• Synthetic Biology
• Systems Biology

Complex systems theory analyzes the nature of complex systems and the reasons underlying their unusual properties.

• Complex adaptive system
• Complex systems
• Theory of complex systems

In computer engineering, cybernetics methods are used to control devices and analyze information.

• Robotics
• Decision Support System
• Cellular automaton
• Simulation
• Computer Vision
• Artificial intelligence
• Object Recognition
• Control system
• ACS
• Cybersemiotics

Cybernetics in engineering is used to analyze the failures of systems in which small errors and flaws can cause the entire system to fail.

• Adaptive system
• Ergonomics
• Biomedical Engineering
• Neurocomputing
• Technical Cybernetics
• System engineering

• Cybernetic Control
• Economic Cybernetics
• Operations research

• Dynamic system
• Information theory
• System theory

• Memetics
• Social Cybernetics

In ancient Greece, the term "cybernetics", originally denoting the art of the helmsman, began to be used figuratively to denote the art of a statesman who manages a city. In this sense, it is used, in particular, by Plato in the Laws.

The word fr. "cybernétique" was used almost in its modern sense in 1834 by the French physicist and systematizer of sciences André Ampère. André-Marie Ampère, 1775–1836), to designate the science of management in his system of classification of human knowledge:

"CYBERNETICS. Relations of the people to the people, studied <... > the preceding sciences, only a small part of the objects for which the government should take care; His attention is also constantly required by the maintenance of public order, the execution of laws, the fair distribution of taxes, the selection of people whom he should appoint, and everything that contributes to the improvement of the social condition. It must constantly choose between the various measures best suited to the attainment of the end; and it is only by a thorough study and comparison of the various elements afforded to him for this choice by a knowledge of all that pertains to the nation, that he is able to govern in accordance with his character, customs, means of subsistence, prosperity, organization, and laws, which may serve as general rules of conduct, and which guide him in every particular case. And so, it is only after all the sciences dealing with these various objects that we must put this one, which I am now talking about and which I call cybernetics, from the word Ancient Greek. κυβερνητιχη; this word, adopted at first in a narrow sense to denote the art of navigation, was used by the Greeks themselves in an incomparably broader sense of the art of government in general".

The first artificial automatic control system, the water clock, was invented by the ancient Greek mechanic Ctesibius. In his water clock, water flowed from a source, such as a stabilizing tank, into a pool, then from the pool to the clock movements. Ctesibius' device used a cone-shaped flow to control the water level in his tank and adjust the flow rate of the water accordingly to maintain a constant water level in the tank, so that it was neither overfilled nor drained. It was the first artificial, truly automatic, self-regulating device that did not require any external interference between the feedback and the control mechanisms. Although they naturally did not refer to the concept as the science of cybernetics (they considered it a field of engineering), Ctesibius and other masters of antiquity, such as Heron of Alexandria or the Chinese scientist Su Sun, are considered among the first to study cybernetic principles. The study of mechanisms in corrective feedback machines dates back to the late 18th century, when James Watt's steam engine was equipped with a control device, a centrifugal feedback regulator, in order to control the speed ^of the engine. A. Wallace described feedback as "necessary to the principle of evolution" in his famous 1858 paper. In 1868, the great physicist J. Maxwell published a theoretical article on control devices, one of the first to consider and improve the principles of self-regulating devices. J. Uexküll used the feedback mechanism in his model of the functional cycle (in German: Funktionskreis) to explain the behavior of animals.

Modern cybernetics began in the 1940s as an interdisciplinary field of study combining control systems, electrical circuit theories, mechanical engineering, logical modeling, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. Electronic control systems date back to the work of Bell Labs engineer Harold Black in 1927 on the use of negative feedback to control amplifiers. The ideas are also relevant to the biological work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in general systems theory.

Early applications of negative feedback in electronic circuits included controlling artillery mounts and radar antennas during World War II. Jay Forrester, a graduate student at the Servo Machinery Laboratory at MIT who worked with Gordon S. Brown during World War II to improve electronic control systems for the U.S. Navy, later applied these ideas to public organizations such as corporations and cities as the original organizer of MIT's School of Industrial Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Forrester is also known as the founder of system dynamics.

W. Deming, the guru of total quality management, in whose honor Japan established its major industry award in 1950, was a young scientist at Bell Telephone Labs in 1927 and may have been influenced by his work in the field of network analysis. Deming made "understanding systems" one of the four pillars of what he described as deep knowledge in his book The New Economy.

Numerous works appeared in related fields. In 1935, the Soviet physiologist P. K. Anokhin published a book in which the concept of feedback ("reverse afferentation") was studied. Research continued, particularly in the field of mathematical modeling of regulatory processes, and two key papers were published in 1943. These works were Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology by Norbert Wiener and J. Bigelow^{, and} The Logical Calculus of Ideas Relating to Neural Activity by W. McCulloch and W. Pitts.

Cybernetics as a scientific discipline was based on the work of Wiener, McCulloch, and others such as W. R. Ashby and W. G. Walter.

Walter was one of the first to build autonomous robots to help study animal behavior. Along with Great Britain and the United States, France was an important geographical location for early cybernetics.

In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis held in Nancy, France. The event was organized by a group of mathematicians led by Nicolas Bourbaki, where mathematician S. Mandelbrouth played an important role.

During this stay in France, Wiener received an offer to write an essay on the topic of combining this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of Brownian motion (the so-called Wiener process) and in the theory of telecommunications. The following summer, in the United States, he used the term "cybernetics" as the title of a scientific theory. The title was intended to describe the study of "purposive mechanisms" and was popularized in Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in Animal and Machine (Hermann & Cie, Paris, 1948). In the UK, the Ratio Club was formed around this in 1949^.

In the early 1940s, John von Neumann, better known for his work in mathematics and computer science, made a unique and unusual addition to the world of cybernetics: the concept of the cellular automaton and the "universal constructor" (a self-replicating cellular automaton). The result of these deceptively simple thought experiments was the precise concept of self-replication, which cybernetics adopted as the basic concept. The notion that the same properties of genetic reproduction applied to the social world, living cells, and even computer viruses is further proof of the universality of cybernetic research.

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

One of the main centers of research at that time was the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois, which was headed by H. Foerster for almost 20 years, starting in 1958.

Over the past 30 years, cybernetics has gone through ups and downs, becoming increasingly important in the field of artificial intelligence and biological machine interfaces (i.e., cyborgs), but having lost support, it has lost its bearings for further development.

In the 1970s, the new cybernetics manifested itself in various fields, but especially in biology. Some biologists have been influenced by cybernetic ideas (Maturana and Varela 1980; Varela, 1979; Atlan ⁽1979) "realized that the cybernetic metaphors of the program on which molecular biology was based represented a concept of autonomy that was impossible for a living being. Consequently, these thinkers had to invent a new cybernetics, more suitable for the organizations that mankind finds in nature, organizations that it did not invent ^itself. The possibility that this new cybernetics is applicable to social forms of organizations has been the subject of theoretical debate since the 1980s.

In economics, the Cybersyn project attempted to introduce a cybernetic planned economy in Chile in the early 1970s.

In the 1980s, the new cybernetics, unlike its predecessor, was interested in "the interaction of autonomous political figures and subgroups, as well as the practical and reflexive consciousness of the objects that create and reproduce the structure of the political community. The main view is to consider the recursivity, or self-dependence of political speech, both in relation to the expression of political consciousness and in the ways in which systems are created on the basis of ^themselves.

In 1978, the Dutch sociologists Geyer and Van der Zouwen identified a number of features of the emerging new cybernetics. "One of the features of the new cybernetics is that it considers information as constructed and recovered by man interacting with the environment. This provides the epistemological foundation of science when viewed from the perspective of an observer. Another feature of the new cybernetics is its contribution to overcoming the problem of reduction (contradictions between macro- and microanalysis). Thus, it connects the individual with society". Geyer and van der Zoeven also noted that "the transition from classical cybernetics to new cybernetics leads to a transition from classical problems to new problems. These changes in reflection include, among others, changes from the emphasis on the managed system to the governing system and the factor that guides management decisions. And a new emphasis on communication between multiple systems that are trying to control each other.^"

Recent efforts in the study of cybernetics, control systems, and behavior under change, as well as in related fields such as game theory (the analysis of group interaction), feedback systems in evolution, and the study of metamaterials (materials with the properties of atoms, their constituents, beyond Newtonian properties), have led to a revival of interest in this increasingly