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<blockquote>
Again, in a ship, if a man were at liberty to do what he chose, but were devoid of mind and excellence in navigation (αρετης κυβερνητικης), do you perceive what must happen to him and his fellow sailors? ([[Plato]], ''[[Alcibiades]]'', 135A).
</blockquote>
'''Cybernetics''' is the study of [[communication]] and [[control theory|control]], typically involving regulatory [[feedback]], in living organisms, machines, organizations, and their combinations. For example, it includes the study of computer-controlled machines such as automata and robots, along with the study of sociotechnical systems. The term ''cybernetics'' stems from the [[Ancient Greek|Greek]] Κυβερνήτης (''kybernetes'', steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder — the same root as the word ''[[government]]''). It is an earlier but still-used generic term for many of the subject matters that are increasingly subject to specialization under the headings of [[adaptive system]]s, [[artificial intelligence]], [[complex system]]s, [[complexity theory]], [[control system]]s, [[decision support system]]s, [[dynamical system]]s, [[information theory]], [[learning organization]]s, [[mathematical systems theory]], [[operations research]], [[simulation]], and [[systems engineering]]. A more philosophical definition, suggested in [[1956]] by [[Louis Couffignal]], one of the pioneers of cybernetics, characterizes cybernetics as "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action".
==History==
Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of [[control system]]s, [[electrical network]] theory, [[logic modeling]], and [[neuroscience]] in the 1940s. The name ''cybernetics'' was coined by [[Norbert Wiener]] to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and was popularized through his book ''Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine'' ([[1948]]).
The word ''cybernetics'' ('cybernétique') had, unbeknownst to Wiener, also been used in [[1834]] by the physicist [[André-Marie Ampère]] (1775–1836) to denote the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge. It was also used by [[Plato]] in [[The Laws]] to signify the governance of people. The words govern and [[governor]] are also derived from the same Greek root.
The study of teleological mechanisms (from the [[Ancient Greek|Greek]] τέλος or ''telos'' for ''end'', ''goal'', or ''purpose'') in machines with corrective feedback dates from as far back as the late [[1700s]] when [[James Watt]]'s steam engine was equipped with a [[governor (device)|governor]], a centrifugal feedback valve for controlling the speed of the engine. In [[1868]] [[James Clerk Maxwell]] published a theoretical article on governors. In [[1935]] Russian physiologist [[P.K. Anokhin]] published a book in which the concept of [[feedback]] ("back [[afferent]]ation") was studied. The Romanian scientist [[Ştefan Odobleja]] published ''Psychologie consonantiste'' (Paris, 1938), describing many cybernetic principles. In the [[1940s]] the study and mathematical modelling of regulatory processes became a continuing research effort and two key articles were published in [[1943]]. These papers were "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by [[Arturo Rosenblueth]], [[Norbert Wiener]], and [[Julian Bigelow]]; and the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by [[Warren McCulloch]] and [[Walter Pitts]].
Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as [[W. Ross Ashby]] and [[Grey Walter|W. Grey Walter]]. Grey Walter was one of the first to build autonomous robots as an aid to the study of animal behaviour. Together with the [[United States|US]] and [[United Kingdom|UK]], an important geographical locus of early cybernetics was [[France]] where Wiener's book was first published.
In the spring of [[1947]], Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in [[Nancy]], [[France]] and organized by the [[bourbaki]]an mathematician, [[Szolem Mandelbrojt]] (1899-1983), uncle of the world-famous mathematician [[Benoît Mandelbrot]].
During this stay in France, Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the unifying character of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of [[Brownian motion]] and in telecommunication engineering. The following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism cybernetics into his scientific theory.
Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems such as a regulated steam engine and human institutions in his best-selling ''The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society'' (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).
While not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the [http://www.ece.uiuc.edu/pubs/bcl/mueller/index.htm Biological Computer Lab] at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, under the direction of [[Heinz von Foerster]] was a [http://www.ece.uiuc.edu/pubs/bcl/hutchinson/index.htm major center of cybernetic research] for almost 20 years, beginning in 1958.
==Scope==
In scholarly terms, cybernetics is the study of systems and control in an abstracted sense — that is, it is not grounded in any one empirical field.
The emphasis is on the functional relations that hold between the different parts of a system, rather than the parts themselves. These relations include the transfer of [[information]], and circular relations ([[feedback]]) that result in emergent phenomena such as [[self-organization]], and, (expressed as a term coined much later by [[Humberto Maturana]], [[Francisco Varela]] and [[Ricardo Uribe]]), [[autopoiesis]]. The main innovation of cybernetics was the creation of a scientific discipline focused on goals: an understanding of goal-directedness or [[purpose]], resulting from a [[negative feedback]] loop which minimizes the deviation between the perceived situation and the desired situation (goal). As mechanistic as that sounds, cybernetics has the scope and rigor to encompass the human social interactions of agreement and collaboration that, after all, require goals and feedback to attain.
Ampère's earlier use of the term echoes in the development of [[second-order cybernetics]], which includes observers as part of whatever system is being studied. A primary force behind second-order-cybernetics was [[Heinz von Foerster]], an Austrian trained in physics, who was appointed by Warren McCulloch as the editor of the [[Macy conferences]], a series of meetings held between 1946 and 1955, involving [[Gregory Bateson]], [[Margaret Mead]], [[F.S.C. Northrop]], [[John von Neumann]], [[Claude Shannon]], [[Konrad Lorenz]], [[Warren McCulloch]], [[Grey Walter|W. Grey Walter]], and [[Norbert Wiener]]. (Wiener is usually considered the "father of cybernetics" because of his authorship of the book ''Cybernetics'', published in 1948, but this is an oversimplification that Wiener would be the first to point out.) These meetings were originally called "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems". From this original title, as well as the breadth of fields represented by the attendees, the scope and depth of second-order cybernetics is dramatically apparent.
==References==
* Ashby, W.R. (1956), ''Introduction to Cybernetics''. Methuen, London, UK. [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf PDF text].
* Bluma, Lars (2005), ''Norbert Wiener und die Entstehung der Kybernetik im Zweiten Weltkrieg'', Münster.
* Boulding, Kenneth E. (1956), ''The Image : Knowledge in Life and Society'', University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
* Clynes, Manfred E., and Kline, Nathan S. (1960) "Cyborgs and Space", ''Astronautics'', pp. 26-27 and 74-75. Reprinted, pp. 29-34 in Gray, Mentor, and Figueroa-Sarriera (eds.), ''The Cyborg Handbook'', Routledge, New York, NY 1995.
* Couffignal, L., "Essay d’une définition générale de la cybernétique", ''The First International Congress on Cybernetics'', Namur, Belgium, June 26-29, 1956, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1958, pp. 46-54.
* Heims, Steve J. (1980), ''John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death'', 3. Aufl., Cambridge.
* Heims, Steve J. (1993), ''Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America. The Cybernetics Group, 1946-1953'', Cambridge University Press, London, UK.
* Heylighen F., and Joslyn C. (2001), "[http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Cybernetics-EPST.pdf Cybernetics and Second Order Cybernetics]", in: R.A. Meyers (ed.), Encyclopedia of Physical Science & Technology (3rd ed.), Vol. 4, (Academic Press, New York), p. 155-170.
* Ilgauds, Hans Joachim (1980), ''Norbert Wiener'', Leipzig.
* Masani, P. Rustom (1990), ''Norbert Wiener 1894-1964'', Basel.
* Medina, Eden (2006), "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation : Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile", ''Journal of Latin American Studies'' 38, 571-606.
* Pangaro, Paul (1990), "Cybernetics — A Definition", [http://pangaro.com/published/cyber-macmillan.html Eprint].
* Patten, B.C., and Odum, E.P. (1981), "The Cybernetic Nature of Ecosystems", ''The American Naturalist'' 118, 886-895.
* [[Plato]], "Alcibiades 1", [[W.R.M. Lamb]] (trans.), pp. 93–223 in ''Plato, Volume 12'', [[Loeb Classical Library]], [[William Heinemann]], London, UK, 1927.
* von Foerster, Heinz (1995), "Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics", [http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html Eprint].
* Norbert Wiener (1948), ''Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine'', MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
==See also==
===Related fields===
{{col-begin}}
{{col-break}}
* [[Biological cybernetics]]
* [[Biomedical engineering]]
* [[Engineering cybernetics]]
* [[Management science]]
* [[Medical cybernetics]]
{{col-break}}
* [[Organizational cybernetics]]
* [[Psychocybernetics]]
* [[Quantum cybernetics]]
* [[Sociocybernetics]]
{{col-end}}
===Related topics===
{{col-begin}}
{{col-break}}
* [[Artificial intelligence]]
* [[Artificial life]]
* [[Automation]]
* [[Complex system]]s
* [[Connectionism]]
* [[Decision theory]]
* [[Game theory]]
* [[Information theory]]
* [[Intelligence amplification]]
{{col-break}}
* [[Network theory]] (''diktyology'')
* [[Project Cybersyn]]
* [[Second order cybernetics]]
* [[Systems biology]]
* [[Semiotics]]
* [[Semiotic information theory]]
* [[Synergetics]]
* [[Systems theory]]
{{col-end}}
==External links==
* [http://wiki.biological-cybernetics.de BioCybernetics Wiki]
* [http://www.biological-cybernetics.de Biological cybernetics portal]
* [http://histm2.free.fr/H.Couffign.htm Louis Couffignal's photos & documents]
* [http://www.cybersyn.cl/ Cybersyn Project in Chile by Stafford Beer]
* [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/indexASC.html Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems]
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~asc/slide/s1.html Glossary Slideshow (136 slides)]
* [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html Principia Cybernetica Web]
* [http://www.systems-thinking.de Mindmap-based-page by Ragnar Heil]
* [http://www.cybsoc.org The Cybernetics Society]
* [http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/ American Society for Cybernetics]
* [http://www.ieeesmc.org/ IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Society]
* [http://www.iberobotics.com/ Iberobotics - Portal de Robótica en Castellano]
* [http://www.infoamerica.org/documentos_word/shannon-wiener.htm Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France and the Soviet Union]
* [http://www.medical-cybernetics.de Medizinische Kybernetik | Medical Cybernetics]
* [http://open-site.org/Science/Mathematics/Applied/Cybernetics/ Cybernetics category in the Open Encyclopedia Project]
* [http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~gossimit/ifsr/francois/papers/systemics_and_cybernetics_in_a_historical_perspective.pdf Systemics and cybernetics in a historical perspective (pdf document)]
* ([http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~gossimit/ifsr/francois/ more related pdf documents])
* [http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/cybernetics.html Basics of Cybernetics]
* [http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/definitions.htm Several definitions of cybernetics]
* [http://dsoul.blogharbor.com/blog/Systems/Cybernetics Cybernetics Portal]
* [http://www.squidoo.com/Cybernetics Cybernetics Lens]
==Document history==
* Some content adapted fom the [http://www.getwiki.net/ GetWiki] article [http://www.getwiki.net/-Cybernetics&oldid=1536 "Cybernetics"] under the [[GNU Free Documentation License]].
<!--via GetWiki: Cybernetics
revision as of 14:18, 30 Nov 2006 by Jon Awbrey
//-->
* Some content adapted from the [http://wikinfo.org/index.php/ Wikinfo] article, [http://wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=Cybernetics&oldid=57542 "Cybernetics"] under the [[GNU Free Documentation License]].
<!--via Wikinfo: Cybernetics
revision as of 13:54, 22 Nov 2006 by Jon Awbrey
//-->
* Some content adapted from the [http://en.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia] article, [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cybernetics&oldid=74020783 "Cybernetics"] under the [[GNU Free Documentation License]].
<!--via Wikipedia: Cybernetics
revision as of 21:24, 5 Sep 2006 by Jon Awbrey
//-->
Again, in a ship, if a man were at liberty to do what he chose, but were devoid of mind and excellence in navigation (αρετης κυβερνητικης), do you perceive what must happen to him and his fellow sailors? ([[Plato]], ''[[Alcibiades]]'', 135A).
</blockquote>
'''Cybernetics''' is the study of [[communication]] and [[control theory|control]], typically involving regulatory [[feedback]], in living organisms, machines, organizations, and their combinations. For example, it includes the study of computer-controlled machines such as automata and robots, along with the study of sociotechnical systems. The term ''cybernetics'' stems from the [[Ancient Greek|Greek]] Κυβερνήτης (''kybernetes'', steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder — the same root as the word ''[[government]]''). It is an earlier but still-used generic term for many of the subject matters that are increasingly subject to specialization under the headings of [[adaptive system]]s, [[artificial intelligence]], [[complex system]]s, [[complexity theory]], [[control system]]s, [[decision support system]]s, [[dynamical system]]s, [[information theory]], [[learning organization]]s, [[mathematical systems theory]], [[operations research]], [[simulation]], and [[systems engineering]]. A more philosophical definition, suggested in [[1956]] by [[Louis Couffignal]], one of the pioneers of cybernetics, characterizes cybernetics as "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action".
==History==
Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of [[control system]]s, [[electrical network]] theory, [[logic modeling]], and [[neuroscience]] in the 1940s. The name ''cybernetics'' was coined by [[Norbert Wiener]] to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and was popularized through his book ''Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine'' ([[1948]]).
The word ''cybernetics'' ('cybernétique') had, unbeknownst to Wiener, also been used in [[1834]] by the physicist [[André-Marie Ampère]] (1775–1836) to denote the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge. It was also used by [[Plato]] in [[The Laws]] to signify the governance of people. The words govern and [[governor]] are also derived from the same Greek root.
The study of teleological mechanisms (from the [[Ancient Greek|Greek]] τέλος or ''telos'' for ''end'', ''goal'', or ''purpose'') in machines with corrective feedback dates from as far back as the late [[1700s]] when [[James Watt]]'s steam engine was equipped with a [[governor (device)|governor]], a centrifugal feedback valve for controlling the speed of the engine. In [[1868]] [[James Clerk Maxwell]] published a theoretical article on governors. In [[1935]] Russian physiologist [[P.K. Anokhin]] published a book in which the concept of [[feedback]] ("back [[afferent]]ation") was studied. The Romanian scientist [[Ştefan Odobleja]] published ''Psychologie consonantiste'' (Paris, 1938), describing many cybernetic principles. In the [[1940s]] the study and mathematical modelling of regulatory processes became a continuing research effort and two key articles were published in [[1943]]. These papers were "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by [[Arturo Rosenblueth]], [[Norbert Wiener]], and [[Julian Bigelow]]; and the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by [[Warren McCulloch]] and [[Walter Pitts]].
Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as [[W. Ross Ashby]] and [[Grey Walter|W. Grey Walter]]. Grey Walter was one of the first to build autonomous robots as an aid to the study of animal behaviour. Together with the [[United States|US]] and [[United Kingdom|UK]], an important geographical locus of early cybernetics was [[France]] where Wiener's book was first published.
In the spring of [[1947]], Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in [[Nancy]], [[France]] and organized by the [[bourbaki]]an mathematician, [[Szolem Mandelbrojt]] (1899-1983), uncle of the world-famous mathematician [[Benoît Mandelbrot]].
During this stay in France, Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the unifying character of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of [[Brownian motion]] and in telecommunication engineering. The following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism cybernetics into his scientific theory.
Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems such as a regulated steam engine and human institutions in his best-selling ''The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society'' (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).
While not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the [http://www.ece.uiuc.edu/pubs/bcl/mueller/index.htm Biological Computer Lab] at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, under the direction of [[Heinz von Foerster]] was a [http://www.ece.uiuc.edu/pubs/bcl/hutchinson/index.htm major center of cybernetic research] for almost 20 years, beginning in 1958.
==Scope==
In scholarly terms, cybernetics is the study of systems and control in an abstracted sense — that is, it is not grounded in any one empirical field.
The emphasis is on the functional relations that hold between the different parts of a system, rather than the parts themselves. These relations include the transfer of [[information]], and circular relations ([[feedback]]) that result in emergent phenomena such as [[self-organization]], and, (expressed as a term coined much later by [[Humberto Maturana]], [[Francisco Varela]] and [[Ricardo Uribe]]), [[autopoiesis]]. The main innovation of cybernetics was the creation of a scientific discipline focused on goals: an understanding of goal-directedness or [[purpose]], resulting from a [[negative feedback]] loop which minimizes the deviation between the perceived situation and the desired situation (goal). As mechanistic as that sounds, cybernetics has the scope and rigor to encompass the human social interactions of agreement and collaboration that, after all, require goals and feedback to attain.
Ampère's earlier use of the term echoes in the development of [[second-order cybernetics]], which includes observers as part of whatever system is being studied. A primary force behind second-order-cybernetics was [[Heinz von Foerster]], an Austrian trained in physics, who was appointed by Warren McCulloch as the editor of the [[Macy conferences]], a series of meetings held between 1946 and 1955, involving [[Gregory Bateson]], [[Margaret Mead]], [[F.S.C. Northrop]], [[John von Neumann]], [[Claude Shannon]], [[Konrad Lorenz]], [[Warren McCulloch]], [[Grey Walter|W. Grey Walter]], and [[Norbert Wiener]]. (Wiener is usually considered the "father of cybernetics" because of his authorship of the book ''Cybernetics'', published in 1948, but this is an oversimplification that Wiener would be the first to point out.) These meetings were originally called "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems". From this original title, as well as the breadth of fields represented by the attendees, the scope and depth of second-order cybernetics is dramatically apparent.
==References==
* Ashby, W.R. (1956), ''Introduction to Cybernetics''. Methuen, London, UK. [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf PDF text].
* Bluma, Lars (2005), ''Norbert Wiener und die Entstehung der Kybernetik im Zweiten Weltkrieg'', Münster.
* Boulding, Kenneth E. (1956), ''The Image : Knowledge in Life and Society'', University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
* Clynes, Manfred E., and Kline, Nathan S. (1960) "Cyborgs and Space", ''Astronautics'', pp. 26-27 and 74-75. Reprinted, pp. 29-34 in Gray, Mentor, and Figueroa-Sarriera (eds.), ''The Cyborg Handbook'', Routledge, New York, NY 1995.
* Couffignal, L., "Essay d’une définition générale de la cybernétique", ''The First International Congress on Cybernetics'', Namur, Belgium, June 26-29, 1956, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1958, pp. 46-54.
* Heims, Steve J. (1980), ''John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death'', 3. Aufl., Cambridge.
* Heims, Steve J. (1993), ''Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America. The Cybernetics Group, 1946-1953'', Cambridge University Press, London, UK.
* Heylighen F., and Joslyn C. (2001), "[http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Cybernetics-EPST.pdf Cybernetics and Second Order Cybernetics]", in: R.A. Meyers (ed.), Encyclopedia of Physical Science & Technology (3rd ed.), Vol. 4, (Academic Press, New York), p. 155-170.
* Ilgauds, Hans Joachim (1980), ''Norbert Wiener'', Leipzig.
* Masani, P. Rustom (1990), ''Norbert Wiener 1894-1964'', Basel.
* Medina, Eden (2006), "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation : Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile", ''Journal of Latin American Studies'' 38, 571-606.
* Pangaro, Paul (1990), "Cybernetics — A Definition", [http://pangaro.com/published/cyber-macmillan.html Eprint].
* Patten, B.C., and Odum, E.P. (1981), "The Cybernetic Nature of Ecosystems", ''The American Naturalist'' 118, 886-895.
* [[Plato]], "Alcibiades 1", [[W.R.M. Lamb]] (trans.), pp. 93–223 in ''Plato, Volume 12'', [[Loeb Classical Library]], [[William Heinemann]], London, UK, 1927.
* von Foerster, Heinz (1995), "Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics", [http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html Eprint].
* Norbert Wiener (1948), ''Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine'', MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
==See also==
===Related fields===
{{col-begin}}
{{col-break}}
* [[Biological cybernetics]]
* [[Biomedical engineering]]
* [[Engineering cybernetics]]
* [[Management science]]
* [[Medical cybernetics]]
{{col-break}}
* [[Organizational cybernetics]]
* [[Psychocybernetics]]
* [[Quantum cybernetics]]
* [[Sociocybernetics]]
{{col-end}}
===Related topics===
{{col-begin}}
{{col-break}}
* [[Artificial intelligence]]
* [[Artificial life]]
* [[Automation]]
* [[Complex system]]s
* [[Connectionism]]
* [[Decision theory]]
* [[Game theory]]
* [[Information theory]]
* [[Intelligence amplification]]
{{col-break}}
* [[Network theory]] (''diktyology'')
* [[Project Cybersyn]]
* [[Second order cybernetics]]
* [[Systems biology]]
* [[Semiotics]]
* [[Semiotic information theory]]
* [[Synergetics]]
* [[Systems theory]]
{{col-end}}
==External links==
* [http://wiki.biological-cybernetics.de BioCybernetics Wiki]
* [http://www.biological-cybernetics.de Biological cybernetics portal]
* [http://histm2.free.fr/H.Couffign.htm Louis Couffignal's photos & documents]
* [http://www.cybersyn.cl/ Cybersyn Project in Chile by Stafford Beer]
* [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/indexASC.html Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems]
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~asc/slide/s1.html Glossary Slideshow (136 slides)]
* [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html Principia Cybernetica Web]
* [http://www.systems-thinking.de Mindmap-based-page by Ragnar Heil]
* [http://www.cybsoc.org The Cybernetics Society]
* [http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/ American Society for Cybernetics]
* [http://www.ieeesmc.org/ IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Society]
* [http://www.iberobotics.com/ Iberobotics - Portal de Robótica en Castellano]
* [http://www.infoamerica.org/documentos_word/shannon-wiener.htm Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France and the Soviet Union]
* [http://www.medical-cybernetics.de Medizinische Kybernetik | Medical Cybernetics]
* [http://open-site.org/Science/Mathematics/Applied/Cybernetics/ Cybernetics category in the Open Encyclopedia Project]
* [http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~gossimit/ifsr/francois/papers/systemics_and_cybernetics_in_a_historical_perspective.pdf Systemics and cybernetics in a historical perspective (pdf document)]
* ([http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~gossimit/ifsr/francois/ more related pdf documents])
* [http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/cybernetics.html Basics of Cybernetics]
* [http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/definitions.htm Several definitions of cybernetics]
* [http://dsoul.blogharbor.com/blog/Systems/Cybernetics Cybernetics Portal]
* [http://www.squidoo.com/Cybernetics Cybernetics Lens]
==Document history==
* Some content adapted fom the [http://www.getwiki.net/ GetWiki] article [http://www.getwiki.net/-Cybernetics&oldid=1536 "Cybernetics"] under the [[GNU Free Documentation License]].
<!--via GetWiki: Cybernetics
revision as of 14:18, 30 Nov 2006 by Jon Awbrey
//-->
* Some content adapted from the [http://wikinfo.org/index.php/ Wikinfo] article, [http://wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=Cybernetics&oldid=57542 "Cybernetics"] under the [[GNU Free Documentation License]].
<!--via Wikinfo: Cybernetics
revision as of 13:54, 22 Nov 2006 by Jon Awbrey
//-->
* Some content adapted from the [http://en.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia] article, [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cybernetics&oldid=74020783 "Cybernetics"] under the [[GNU Free Documentation License]].
<!--via Wikipedia: Cybernetics
revision as of 21:24, 5 Sep 2006 by Jon Awbrey
//-->
