Definitions
Cybernetics is a broad subject, transcending traditional academic disciplines, and as such there are various ways of defining or commenting on the subject. Here are some of them:
- 'Control and communication in the animal or in the machine' - the early formal definition, used by Wiener in the title of his book
- 'The science of interacting systems - as Cybernetics is not restricted to any one area, it can be applied to different systems - and typically these systems, or components within them, interact with each other. In a control system, such as a steersman, the controller (eg the steersman) interacts with the device being controlled (eg the boat), but the boat interacts with the steersman.'
- 'The acquisition, communication, processing and application of information' - definition used at University of Reading
- 'The science of effective organization' - from Stafford Beer, who pioneered the application of cybernetics to management.
- 'Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity.'-Heinz von Foerster
- 'A way of thinking' - Ernst von Glasersfeld
- 'A science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control'- A.N. Kolmogorov
- 'The art of steersmanship'; 'deals with all forms of behavior in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible'; 'stands to the real machine-electronic, mechanical, neural, or economic-much as geometry stands to a real object in our terrestrial space'; 'offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored' - W. Ross Ashby
- 'A branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information'-Gregory Bateson
- Peter Fellgett, first Professor of Cybernetics at Reading, described Cybernetics as anything that interested him.