Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The opening passage illustrates the effect of faulty feedback mechanisms by the example of patients with various forms of ataxia. He then discusses railway signalling, the operation of a thermostat, and a steam engine centrifugal governor. The rest of the chapter is mostly taken up with the development of a mathematical formulation of the ...
The word cybernetics refers to the theory of message transmission among people and machines. The thesis of the book is that: society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between ...
Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal [1] processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system's actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action. [2]
Cybernetical physics is a scientific area on the border of cybernetics and physics which studies physical systems with cybernetical methods. Cybernetical methods are understood as methods developed within control theory, information theory, systems theory and related areas: control design, estimation, identification, optimization, pattern recognition, signal processing, image processing, etc ...
An Introduction to Cybernetics is a book by W. Ross Ashby, first published in 1956 in London by Chapman and Hall. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] An Introduction is considered the first textbook on cybernetics , where the basic principles of the new field were first rigorously laid out. [ 3 ]
Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the reflexive practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It is cybernetics where "the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western ...
In An Introduction to Cybernetics, Ashby used set cardinality, or variety, as a measure of information. With this he formulated his Law of Requisite Variety. Mathematically, the law is a statement about how "in a two-person game the variety possible is determined by the number of possible choices open to the two players". [14]
Cybernetics, according to Wiener's definition, is the science of "control and communication in the animal and the machine". Heinz von Foerster went on to distinguish a first order cybernetics, "the study of observed systems", and a second order cybernetics, "the study of observing systems".