Cybernetics and Systems Science
- [The Composition and Structure of Cybernetics - Dmitry A. Novikov]
- Overview
Cybernetics is the scientific study of how information communicates in machines and electronic devices. It also involves comparing this communication to the way information is communicated in the brain and nervous system.
Cybernetics is also a method of studying regulatory systems and their structures, constraints, possibilities and controls. It involves the use of technology to study the control of any system.
Cybernetics focuses on core concepts for understanding complex systems, such as: Learning, cognition, adaptation, emergence, communication, efficiency.
Cybernetics is not just about robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). It is also about exploring and understanding different systems and how they interact, particularly in terms of circular causation. Circular causation or feedback loop is when the results of one part of the system are used as inputs to the next part.
American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894 - 1964) founded the science of cybernetics. He gained international fame for some of the most important contributions to 20th-century mathematics.
- Cybernetics and Systems Science
Cybernetics and systems science constitute a somewhat vaguely defined academic field that involves virtually all traditional disciplines, from mathematics, technology, and biology to philosophy and the social sciences.
More specifically, it is related to the recently developed "complexity sciences", including artificial intelligence (AI), neural networks (NN), dynamical systems, chaos, and complex adaptive systems.
Systems theory or systems science holds that no matter how complex or diverse the world we experience, we will always find different types of organizations in it, and that these organizations can be described in terms of concepts and principles that are independent of the specific domain in which we look.
Therefore, if we discover these general laws, we can analyze and solve problems in any field and in any type of system. The systems approach differs from more traditional analytical approaches by emphasizing the interaction and connectivity of the different components of the system.
Many concepts used by systems scientists come from closely related cybernetic approaches: information, control, feedback, communication, etc.
In fact, cybernetics and systems theory essentially study the same problem. The problem is that organization is independent of the substrate it embodies. In the sense of the distinction, systems theory is more concerned with the structure of systems and their models, whereas cybernetics is concerned with how systems operate, that is, how they control their behavior and communicate with other systems or systems.
Since the structure and function of a system cannot be understood separately, cybernetics and systems theory should clearly be considered as two aspects of a single approach.
[More to come ...]
