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MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES
Cybernetics. History and essence of scientific discovery
Directory / The most important scientific discoveries "Wiener rightfully called the father of cybernetics, - writes V.D. Pekelis. - His book "Cybernetics" appeared in 1948 and shocked many with unexpected conclusions, had a stunning impact on public opinion. Its appearance can be likened to a gradually prepared explosion. In the history of cybernetics, as in any other science, there are two periods: the accumulation of material and its transformation into a new science... Here it is worth mentioning the work of the engineer A. Stodola devoted to the theory of regulation, published at the end of the last century in one of the Swiss journals. They considered the principle of feedback control. The peculiarity of the history of computer technology is significant in that the first calculating machines immediately opened up to man the possibility of mechanizing mental work. Here you can not ignore the "Mathematical Study of Logic" by George Boole. It marked the beginning of the development of the algebra of logic, which is now widely used in cybernetics. When a new section arose in the theory of probability - the theory of information, the universality of the new theory, although not immediately, became clear to everyone. For example, a correspondence was found between the amount of information and the measure of the transition of various forms of energy into thermal energy - entropy. This was first pointed out in 1929 by the famous physicist L. Szilard. Subsequently, information theory became one of the important foundations in cybernetics. In the 30th century, achievements were also noticeable in the physiology of higher nervous activity. Especially in the study of animal learning processes. In the XNUMXs of our century, Berkstein's theory of physiological activity became a phenomenon, and even later the principle of Anokhin's functional system. Together with progress, there is also a convergence of technical means used both in physiology and in automation. Such rapprochement is accompanied by a mutual exchange of principles for constructing block diagrams, modeling ideas, methods of analysis and synthesis of systems. A similar trend was one of the first to catch the Russian philosopher Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov. “My starting point,” the scientist wrote, “is that structural relations can be generalized to such a formal purity of schemes as in mathematics and relations of magnitudes, and on this basis, organizational problems can be solved in ways similar to mathematical ones.” Thus, Bogdanov anticipated the emergence of a general systems theory - one of the key concepts of cybernetics. The Russian scientist was able to substantiate the principle of feedback, calling it "a mechanism of double mutual regulation." Later, in 1936, the English mathematician A. Turing published a paper describing an abstract computer. Some provisions of his work in many respects anticipated various problems of cybernetics. However, the decisive word in the birth of a new science was said by the great American mathematician Wiener. Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) was born in Columbia, Missouri. He learned to read at the age of four, and at six he was already reading Darwin and Dante. At the age of nine, he entered a secondary school, where children began to study from the age of 15-16, having previously completed an eight-year school. He graduated from high school when he was eleven. Immediately the boy entered a higher educational institution, Taft College. After graduating from it, at the age of 14, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree. Then he studied at Harvard and Cornell Universities, at the age of 17 he became a master of arts at Harvard, at 18 - a doctor of philosophy with a degree in mathematical logic. Harvard University awarded Wiener a scholarship to study at Cambridge (England) and Göttingen (Germany) universities. Before the First World War, in the spring of 1914, Wiener moved to Göttingen, where he studied at the university with E. Landau and the great D. Gilbert. At the beginning of the war, Wiener returned to the United States, spent a year in Cambridge, but under the prevailing conditions, he could not achieve scientific results. At Columbia University, he began to study topology, but he did not finish what he started. During the 1915–1916 academic year, Wiener taught mathematics at Harvard University as an assistant. Viner worked for the next academic year at the University of Maine. After the US entered the war, he worked at the General Electric plant, from where he moved to the editorial office of the American Encyclopedia in Albany. Then Norbert participated for some time in compiling tables of artillery firing at the range, where he was even enlisted in the army, but was soon fired due to myopia. Then he got by with articles in newspapers, wrote two papers on algebra, after the publication of which he received a recommendation from professor of mathematics V.F. Osgood and in 1919 joined the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Thus began his service in this institute, which lasted all his life. Here Wiener got acquainted with the content of statistical mechanics W. Gibbs. He managed to connect its main provisions with Lebesgue integration in the study of Brownian motion and wrote several articles. The same approach turned out to be possible in establishing the essence of the shot effect in connection with the passage of electric current through wires or through electron tubes. Returning to the United States, Wiener is intensively engaged in science. In 1920–1925, he solved physical and technical problems with the help of abstract mathematics and found new patterns in the theory of Brownian motion, potential theory, and harmonic analysis. In 1922, 1924 and 1925, Wiener visited Europe with friends and relatives of the family. In 1925, he made a presentation in Göttingen about his work on generalized harmonic analysis, which interested Hilbert, Courant, and Born. Subsequently, Wiener realized that his results were to some extent related to the quantum theory that was developing at that time. At the same time, Wiener met one of the designers of computers - W. Bush, and expressed the idea that once came to his mind of a new harmonic analyzer. Bush made it happen. Wiener's promotion was slow. He tried to get a decent job in other countries, but he didn't succeed. However, the time has come, finally, and luck. At a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, Wiener met with Ya.D. Tamarkin, a Göttingen acquaintance who always spoke highly of his work. The same support was provided to him by Hardy, who repeatedly visited the United States. And this influenced Wiener's position: thanks to Tamarkin and Hardy, he became famous in America. The joint work of Wiener with E. Hopf, who came from Germany to Harvard University, turned out to be especially significant - as a result, the "Wiener-Hopf equation" was included in science, which describes the radiation equilibrium of stars, as well as related to other problems that deal with two different regimes separated by a border. In 1929, the Swedish journal Akta Mathematica and the American Annals of Mathematics published two large final articles by Wiener on generalized harmonic analysis. Since 1932, Wiener has been a professor at MIT. At Harvard, he met the physiologist A. Rosenbluth and began to attend his methodological seminar, which brought together representatives of various sciences. This seminar played an important role in shaping Wiener's ideas of cybernetics. After Rosenbluth's departure for Mexico City, seminar sessions were held sometimes in Mexico City, sometimes at MIT. In 1934, Wiener received an invitation from Tsinghua University (in Beijing) to give a course of lectures on mathematics and electrical engineering. He considered the year of his visit to China the year of his full development as a scientist. During the war, Wiener devoted almost entirely his work to military tasks. He investigates the problem of aircraft movement during anti-aircraft fire. Thought and experimentation convinced Wiener that the anti-aircraft fire control system should be a feedback system; that feedback plays an essential role in the human body. An increasing role is played by predictive processes, which cannot be carried out solely on human consciousness. The computers that existed at that time did not have the necessary speed. This forced Wiener to formulate a number of requirements for such machines. In fact, he predicted the paths that electronic computers would follow in the future. Computing devices, in his opinion, "should consist of vacuum tubes, and not of gears or electromechanical relays. This is necessary to ensure sufficient speed." The next requirement was that computing devices "should use a more economical binary rather than a decimal number system." The machine, Wiener believed, must itself correct its actions, it is necessary to develop the ability for self-learning in it. To do this, it must be provided with a memory block where control signals would be stored, as well as the information that the machine will receive during operation. If earlier the machine was only an executive body, entirely dependent on the will of man, now it has become thinking and acquired a certain degree of independence. In 1943, an article by Wiener, Rosenbluth, Byglow "Behavior, purposefulness and teleology" was published, which is an outline of the cybernetic method. In 1948, the New York publishing house "John Wheely and Sons" and the Parisian "Hermann et Tsi" published Wiener's book "Cybernetics". “The main thesis of the book,” writes G.N. Povarov in the preface to Cybernetics, “is the similarity of control and communication processes in machines, living organisms and societies, whether they are animal societies (anthill) or human. These processes are, first of all, processes of transmission, storage and processing of information, i.e. various signals, messages, information Any signal, any information, regardless of its specific content and purpose, can be considered as some choice between two or more values endowed with known probabilities (selective concept information), and this allows us to approach all processes with a single measure, with a single statistical apparatus. Hence the idea of a general theory of control and communication - cybernetics. The amount of information - the amount of choice - is identified by Wiener with negative entropy and becomes, like the amount of matter or energy, one of the fundamental characteristics of natural phenomena. This is the second cornerstone of the cybernetic building. Hence the interpretation of cybernetics as a theory of organization, as a theory of struggle against world chaos, with a fatal increase in entropy. The acting entity absorbs information from the external environment and uses it to select the correct behavior. Information is never created, it is only transmitted and received, but it can be lost or disappear. It is distorted by interference, "noise", on the way to the object I am inside it and is lost for it. Wiener himself considered the founder of modern control theory J.K. Maxwell, and this is absolutely correct. The theory of automatic control was mainly formulated by J. Maxwell, I. Vyshnegradsky, A. Lyapunov and A. Stodola. What is the merit of N. Wiener? Perhaps his book is simply a compilation of known information, bringing together well-known but disparate material? The main merit of Wiener is that he first understood the fundamental importance of information in management processes. Speaking about control and communication in living organisms and machines, he saw the main thing not just in the words "control" and "communication", but in their combination. Just as in the theory of relativity, it is not the fact of the finiteness of the interaction speed that is important, but the combination of this fact with the concept of the simultaneity of events occurring at different points in space. Cybernetics is the science of information management, and Wiener can rightfully be considered the creator of this science. “With the publication of the book, the first, incubation period in the history of cybernetics ended,” writes G.N. Povarov, “and the second, extremely stormy, period of distribution and approval began. Discussions shook the scientific world. Cybernetics found ardent defenders and equally ardent opponents. .. ...Some saw in cybernetics a complete philosophical twist and a "cold war" against Pavlov's teachings. Others, enthusiasts, attributed all the successes of automation and computer technology to its account and agreed to see genuine intelligent beings already in the "electronic brains" of that time. Still others, not objecting to the essence of the project, however, doubted the success of the undertaken synthesis and reduced cybernetics to mere appeals. ... Passions raged around all this. However, cybernetics eventually won the battle and gained citizenship in the ancient family of sciences. The approval period took about a decade. Gradually, the resolute rejection of cybernetics was replaced by a search for a "rational kernel" in it and the recognition of its usefulness and inevitability. By 1958, almost no one was opposed at all. Wiener's call for synthesis came at an extremely favorable moment, circumstances worked for cybernetics, despite its imperfections and exaggerations. In 1959 academician A.N. Kolmogorov wrote: “Now it’s too late to argue about the degree of Wiener’s luck when, in his famous book in 1948, he chose the name “cybernetics” for the new science. This name is quite established and is perceived as a new term that has little to do with its Greek etymology. systems of any nature capable of perceiving, storing and processing information and using it for control and regulation.At the same time, cybernetics makes extensive use of the mathematical method and seeks to obtain specific special results that allow how to analyze such systems (restore their structure based on the experience of handling them ), and to synthesize them (calculate schemes of systems capable of performing given actions). Thanks to this specific character, cybernetics is in no way reduced to a philosophical discussion of the nature of "expediency" in machines and a philosophical analysis of the range of phenomena it studies." Author: Samin D.K.
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