Cybernetics (redirected from cyberneticists)

cybernetics [Gr.,=steersman], term coined by American mathematician Norbert Wiener to refer to the general analysis of control systems and communication systems in living organisms and machines. In cybernetics, analogies are drawn between the functioning of the brain and nervous system and the computer and other electronic systems. The science overlaps the fields of neurophysiology, information theory, computing machinery, and automation. See servomechanism.

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).

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cybernetics

Science of regulation and control in animals (including humans), organizations, and machines when they are viewed as self-governing whole entities consisting of parts and their organization. It was conceived by Norbert Wiener, who coined the term in 1948. Cybernetics views communication and control in all self-contained complex systems as analogous. It differs from the empirical sciences (physics, biology, etc.) in not being interested in material form but in organization, pattern, and communication in entities. Because of the increasing sophistication of computers and the efforts to make them behave in humanlike ways, cybernetics today is closely allied with artificial intelligence and robotics, and it draws heavily on ideas developed in information theory.

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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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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 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.

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(robotics)

cybernetics - /si:`b*-net'iks/ The study of control and communication in living and man-made systems. The term was first proposed by Norbert Wiener in the book referenced below. Originally, cybernetics drew upon electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, neurophysiology, anthropology, and psychology to study and describe actions, feedback, and response in systems of all kinds. It aims to understand the similarities and differences in internal workings of organic and machine processes and, by formulating abstract concepts common to all systems, to understand their behaviour. Modern "second-order cybernetics" places emphasis on how the process of constructing models of the systems is influenced by those very systems, hence an elegant definition - "applied epistemology". Related recent developments (often referred to as sciences of complexity) that are distinguished as separate disciplines are artificial intelligence, neural networks, systems theory, and chaos theory, but the boundaries between those and cybernetics proper are not precise. See also robot. The Cybernetics Society of the UK. American Society for Cybernetics. IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society. International project "Principia Cybernetica". Usenet newsgroup: sci.systems. ["Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine", N. Wiener, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1948]