Cybernetics

cybernetics is one founded in by American .

It studies it, and opposes it to :

"Just as the entropy is a measurement of disorganization, the information provided by a series of messages is a measurement of organization. "(Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics and company).

It does not attach importance to the form of the transmitting organization of information, being living or with the machine. Of or work founder subtitles it: Cybernetics, gold Animal Control and Communication in the and the Machine - in French, "Cybernetics, or controls it and the communication in the animal and the machine".

It thus does not apply only toartifact but also with the animal and natural field.

Origin

The concept existed before Wiener does not name it. It makes it itself go up with the theory of Gibbs it summarizes the problems thus:

"Up to what point can the answers which we can give to the questions put about a whole of worlds be valid when a vaster unit is concerned? "

Its founder closely binds this science to the integration of the chance in , i.e. at the beginning of XX^E century and at the bases of and of in . It opposes it to physics .

The word

Nobert Wiener explains itself the origin of this word. One can read in the French translation Cybernetics and company:

« ...from where the cybernetic word, which I made derive from the Greek word kubernetes, or "pilot", the same Greek word of which we in the final analysis make our word "governor". In addition, I found thereafter that this word had been already employed by Amp in reference to , and that it had been introduced into another context by a Polish scientist, this employment, in both cases, dating from the first years from XIX^E century. "

Publications

The work of origin is: Cybernetics, gold Animal Control and Communication in the and the Machine of . Its best-seller will follow The Human Uses of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society of which popularized cybernetics by exposing its social implications. With this intention, it establishes analogies between the human society and of the automatic systems such as the controlled steam engines.

The same year tightened published General System Theory of Bertalanffy from which rises Systemic

Science of the systems

Cybernetics is defined as the science of systems, a system being itself defined like a whole of elements in interaction, whose whole comprises properties of which its taken parts are stripped separately. The interactions between the elements can consist of exchanges of matter, energy, or information.

Epistemology

In practice, the field that proposed cybernetics was well too wide to return within the framework of only one discipline. It thus separated in autonomous fields, of which in particular:

automatic, or theory of optimal controls;
system theory or systemic, where it is studiedemergence behaviors of systems independently of the detail of their components.

itself is a science which one could justifiably attach to cybernetics: invisible hand of or effects of under consideration by is well to attach to the effects of system independently of the detail of their components taken individually.

Mechanisms of evolution of the populations studied by Malthus, and Wallace, as well as the mechanism of regulation between preys and modelled by of Bernoulli they are attached to it too.

feedback

feedback and itautocorrection (or self-regulation) are notions of cybernetics.

In fact, since the idea appears of feedback, the optimal way to study a system changes:

In the absence of feedback, one will may find it beneficial to attack it in terms of causality because there are of them no others.
In the event of feedback, there will be perhaps a simpler description by studying it in terms ofstable states and ofunstable states in the loop, without wasting time on a model of "causes" and "effects", except in the study of the external events which can to start the process of looping or to stop it.

The stability of certain loops can then authorize to consider the system in terms of finality when that simplifies the study or the conceptual use of it: one babbit metal heat, a species persists in its existence, preys and predatory balance in an operating range given, etc. without connotation particular in this case.

Others

Cybernetics is sometimes associated in the spirits robotics, because of the uses such as Sirius Cybernetics Corporation of and the term of , term popularized by Clynes and Kline in . However, in erudite terms, it is the study of the systems and the order in an abstracted direction, applicable to the manufactured mechanisms, the alive beings, and the organizations.

cycle Foundation of the writer is conceived on the idea of a cybernetic modeling of becoming empires which it names psycho-history.

See too

Some interesting bonds

Bibliography

Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, gold Animal Control and Communication in the and the Machine, Wiley, - ISBN 026273009X
Norbert Wiener, The Human Uses of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, - ISBN 0306803208
- French translation: Cybernetique and Société the Human use of the Human beings 1^Re edition, Two banks, ISBN 0-201-11259-0
- French translation: Cybernetique and Société the Human use of the Human beings 2^E edition, 10/18, ISBN B0000DOFQI
W. Ross Ashby, Year Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman & Hall, London, [ 1 ]
Breton Philippe, Utopia of the communication, the myth of the planetary village, the discovery/pocket, - ISBN 2707127027
Celine Lafontaine, Cybernetic empire, of the machines to be thought of the thought machine, Test/Threshold, - ISBN 2020561700