Abstract
This section is intended to consider in brief the history of cybernetics and describe “classical” cybernetics. Let us call it “cybernetics 1.0”.
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- 1.
This root induced the words “governor”, “government” and “governance.”
- 2.
Depending on the mutual penetration of subjects and methods, a pair of sciences often appears at the junction of two sciences (e.g., physical chemistry and chemical physics).
- 3.
Interestingly, W. Ashby introduced and analyzed the categories of “variety” and “self-organization,” as well as the terms “homeostat” and “black box” in cybernetics.
- 4.
These definitions will be addressed throughout the whole book, except the Conclusion.
- 5.
Figuratively speaking, the central rode of the “umbrella.”
- 6.
This somewhat conditional differentiation applies not only to sciences, but to researchers. As mentioned in [149], in some fields of science researchers are traditionally divided into two categories. The first one is called “screwmen.” They study new problem domains (“screws”) using common methods (“spanners”). The second category is known as “spannermen”; such researchers design new technologies of cognition (methods, “spanners”) and illustrate their efficiency in different problem domains (for unscrewing common “screws”).
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For instance, A. Kolmogorov believed that cybernetics is not a science but a scientific direction; however, the listed functions also apply to the latter.
- 8.
According to an established tradition, control science will be called control theory (yet, such name narrows its subject).
- 9.
Chapter 4 discusses the history of these scientific directions in more details.
- 10.
Or even with computer science, but we will omit this aggregative term due to its undetermined and eclectic character.
- 11.
Perhaps, this reflects the word “cybernetics” in mass consciousness, even despite that experts in the field disagree with such (general and simplified) usage of the prefix.
- 12.
Principia Cybernetica (V. Turchin et al.), American Society for Cybernetics (http://www.asc-cybernetics.org), World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics, to name a few.
- 13.
Cybernetical physics is a science studying physical systems by cybernetical methods. Owing to the maturity of physical objects modeling (in the sense of duration and depth), today the results in this field can be stated as general and well grounded laws, see [59, pp. 38–40] and below.
- 14.
Such approach has been and still is conventional for theory of control in organizations (e.g., see Fig. 1.4.15 in [131, 159]).
- 15.
This also applies to systems theory and systems analysis, see Chap. 4.
- 16.
Exactly scientific directions, i.e., sciences, group of sciences and application domains.
- 17.
For instance, an efficient solution method for a certain class of control problems becomes applicable to problems in adjacent fields (e.g., communication, production, etc.). Thereby, this method is “transferred” from control theory to cybernetics. And then, it can be an asset of applied mathematics, i.e., a “spanner” for experts in various fields (whenever studied systems satisfy its initial requirements).
- 18.
Actually, the first popularizer was N. Wiener himself. Later, he mentioned that the appearance of the book [221] in a moment transformed him from a working scientist with a definite authority in his research field into some public figure. That was pleasing, but also had negative consequences, as henceforth N. Wiener was obliged to maintain business relations with various scientific groups and take part in a movement which rapidly gained in scope so that he could not even cope with it.
- 19.
Such “researchers” exist in any science, especially in and around intensively developing ones.
- 20.
In fact, valuable results in automatic control theory, statistical communication theory, etc. were followed by some recession (quite naturally, see Fig. 5.11).
- 21.
During his speech at 1962 IFIP Meeting, USSR representative A. Dorodnitsyn suggested two terms for the glossary of information processing, namely, “Cybernetics active” and “Cybernetics talkative.”
- 22.
In this sense, interdisciplinarity is rather a negative feature.
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Novikov, D.A. (2016). Cybernetics in the 20th Century. In: Cybernetics. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 47. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27397-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27397-6_1
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