Introduction

1. Robert Wiener and the prerequisites for the creation of cybernetics

Conclusion

The son of a Russian-born Slavic professor, Norbert Wiener received his Ph.D. from Harvard University at the age of 18. After the end of the First World War, Wiener became a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he carried out a number of world-class mathematical research. Here he developed a long-term personal friendship with Vannevar Bush.

It was W. Bush, with the outbreak of World War II, who attracted Wiener to solve mathematical problems related to the control of anti-aircraft fire based on information received from radar stations. Thus, Wiener became a participant in the Battle of England, thanks to which he was able to meet Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Of great importance for the formation of Wiener's views on the problem of "man and computer" was the joint work with the Mexican psychologist and cardiologist Arthur Rosenbluth, the book "Cybernetics" was dedicated to him. It is difficult to list all those great scientists with whom Wiener communicated, we will name only the most famous names: Albert Einstein, Max Born, Richard Courant, Claude Shannon, Felix Klein.

Norbert Wiener, like no one else, contributed to the fact that MIT has become one of the leading scientific centers in the world, and the figure of an absent-minded professor with a constant cigar has become a kind of symbol of this institute. A kind of cult of Wiener arose among young scientists, he turned into an epic hero, there is even a site of very cute jokes, where Wiener acts as the main character.

It should not be surprising that Wiener does not have any practical work related to computers, at that time he was occupied with more serious things. Wiener became the founder of cybernetic philosophy, the founder of his own school, and his merit is that this philosophy was passed on to students and followers. It is the Wiener school that owns a number of works that ultimately led to the birth of the Internet. The Wiener Seminar became the school from which many of the creators of the Net came out. Among them is John Licklider, who a few years later, working on the ARPANet project, became a key figure in the first project of the Network.

Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894 in Columbia, Missouri to a Jewish immigrant from Russia. Norbert's father, Leo Wiener, a native of Bialystok (Belarus), studied in Germany in his youth and spent a rather stormy, adventurous youth. He was a staunch follower of Tolstoy and one of his first translators into English. By the time Norbert was born, he had already become a professor of modern languages ​​at the University of Missouri. A few years later, the Wiener family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here Leo Wiener taught Slavic languages ​​at Harvard University. He was distinguished by broad erudition and non-standard views, which had the greatest effect in raising his own son. Under the guidance of his father, Norbert already learned to read at the age of three, at the age of seven he read Darwin and Dante, at eleven he graduated from high school, at fourteen he graduated from a higher educational institution - Tufts College and received his first degree in his life - Bachelor of Arts. Norbert was well prepared for a brilliant academic career. At eighteen, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In 1913, the young Wiener began his journey through Europe, listening to lectures in Cambridge and Göttingen. After the outbreak of the war, he returns to America. For five years after that, he was plagued by a continuous series of failures. He tried to teach at the University of Maine, wrote articles for an encyclopedia, worked as an assistant engineer, was engaged in journalism, but each time a new type of activity ended in failure. This continued until 1919, when he received, with the help of his father, a teaching position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Forever, i.e. from 1919 and for the rest of his long life, Wiener became a teacher in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 20 - 30 years he visits Europe again. In science, his name becomes known. The "Wiener-Hopf" equation appears in the theory of radiative equilibrium of stars. He lectures at Beijing Tsinghua University. Among his acquaintances are N. Born, M. Born, J. Hadamard and other famous scientists. During the Second World War, he worked on a mathematical apparatus for anti-aircraft fire guidance systems. In this tense atmosphere, the first sketches of what will eventually become a new science are emerging. Here, Wiener first encounters the fact that the machine must perform complex actions to predict the behavior of the target, replacing the gunner, and draws attention to the role of feedback in technology and living organisms. Very productive is his acquaintance with the Mexican physiologist Dr. Arthur Rosenbluth.

2. The concept of cybernetics by Robert Wiener

In 1945 - 47 years. Viner worked at the Cardiology Institute in Mexico City. During these years, Wiener had the idea of ​​the need to create a unified science that studies the processes of storage and processing of information, management and control. For this science, Wiener proposed the name cybernetics, which has received general recognition.

Naturally, the specific content of this new field of knowledge is not the creation of Wiener alone. But Wiener undoubtedly holds the first place in promoting the importance of cybernetics in the entire system of human knowledge.

Promoting and developing the ideas of cybernetics, Wiener published two more books: "Cybernetics and Society" (1950) and "Creator and Robot" (1964). At the same time, Wiener continues to publish special mathematical-cybernetic works.

The concept of cybernetics was born from the synthesis of many scientific directions. Firstly, as a general approach to the description and analysis of the actions of living organisms and computers or other automata. Secondly, from the analogies between the behavior of communities of living organisms and human society and the possibility of their description using the general theory of control. And, finally, from the synthesis of information transmission theory and statistical physics, which led to the most important discovery relating the amount of information and negative entropy in the system. The term "cybernetics" itself comes from the Greek word meaning "pilot", and was first used by Wiener in the modern sense in 1947. The same Greek root, distorted in Latin spelling, formed the word "governor" in English and "governor" in Russian.

Wiener was an encyclopedic scientist with a wide range of interests. Until the end of his life, he was interested in interdisciplinary sections of cybernetics. Homeostatics, sensory prostheses, dynamic prediction theory, time and organization, automata, mathematics of self-organizing systems, dynamical systems in Physics and Biology are some of the publication topics of the last 10 years of his life.

N. Wiener was an internationalist scientist and a true humanist. He was interested and worried about the social consequences of cybernetics, but he believed in the power of the human mind to prevent technocratic catastrophes.

In his historical book, published in 1948, Wiener argued that it is thanks to feedback that all living things adapt to the environment and achieve their goals. "All machines that claim to be "reasonable," he wrote, "should have the ability to pursue certain goals and adapt. That is, to learn."

A few years later, in 1926, great changes took place in his life, after a long period of courtship, he married Margaret Yengerman. Forever and ever. The Wiener family had two daughters. You have to give credit to Margaret. She was a reliable friend, nurse and hostess in the house of her difficult husband in life together. They hardly parted. During numerous and long trips to Europe and China, the family accompanied the professor. Chinese physicist C. K. Jen, who studied at MIT, writes: “Recalling my life at MIT, it is impossible not to mention a wonderful person, Norbert Wiener, whose eccentricity I happened to be a witness. I remember that Professor Wiener always came to the audience without lecture notes. At first he took out a large handkerchief and cleared his nose very energetically and noisily. He paid almost no attention to the audience and rarely announced the topic of the lecture. He turned to face the blackboard, standing very close to it due to his very strong myopia. Although I usually sat in the front row, it was difficult for me to make out what he wrote. Most of the other students could not see anything at all. But the greatest pleasure for the audience was to hear Professor Wiener say to himself: "Well, this is definitely completely wrong." In doing so, he quickly erased everything that was written. Then he started all over again, muttering to himself: "So far this seems to be correct. "And after a minute: "However, this is not may be correct," and erased everything again. This process was repeated over and over until the lecture bell rang. Professor Viner walked out of the classroom without even looking at his students." Robert K. Weatherall, director of alumni employment services, relates the story of one student who "stopped on his way to New Hampshire to help a man standing helplessly beside a car with a punctured tire, "in which he recognized Norbert Wiener. Wiener checked his record book, and said that he could accept help from him, since the credit had already been received. Another MIT employee, the administrator of the department of mathematics Phyllis Block (Phyllis L. Block), recalls: "He often visited me in the office and talked to me. When, a few years later, my office moved to another location, Viner came to introduce himself and get to know me. He did not remember that I was the same person with whom he often interacted. I was in another room and he took me for someone else."

The end of the 40s of our century is marked by the creation of a new "general" science of control - cybernetics. The creation of cybernetics, which reflected the inseparability of control and communication and represented "the doctrine of control devices, the transmission and processing of information in them," was largely facilitated by intensive research and development in the field of creating automatic military equipment, which were especially relevant at that time. time, which included both communication technology and the creation of computers capable of quickly making the necessary complex calculations of the dynamic characteristics of controlled objects. Naturally, the indicated specificity of research, reflecting an engineering and practical orientation, contributed to the fact that specialists in the field of mathematics were closely involved in these studies, to which, in particular, N. Wiener and W.R. Ashby. N. Wiener had to deal with very different problems, in particular, such a "critical task of the day" as "mechanical fire control of anti-aircraft artillery", stand at the origins of the development of digital computers, deal with problems of the functioning of the brain together with A. Rosenbluth, etc. .

Norbert Wiener believed that "the task of cybernetics is to develop a language and techniques that allow in fact to achieve a solution to the problems of control and communication in general, as well as to find an appropriate set of ideas and techniques in order to bring their specific manifestations under certain concepts."

Cybernetics partly fulfilled its tasks, since the principles of modeling, "black box", feedback, communication, the concept of homeostasis, etc., formulated in it, were general methodological principles for considering control problems. Within the framework of cybernetic models, control techniques have been developed, but their scope is limited by fairly strong requirements for the properties of formalized models, which makes them in most cases unsuitable for use in situations that do not allow the required formalization. N. Wiener himself warned about this when he spoke rather skeptically about the practical productivity of cybernetics in managing social processes. "The human sciences are a wretched field for new mathematical methods. Just as wretched would be the statistical mechanics of the eye for a being of the same order of magnitude as a molecule. Fluctuations, which we ignore from a broader point of view, would be of just the greatest interest to him ". It should be noted here that such assessments were largely based on the inadequacy of the probabilistic measure for constructing the behavioral functions of social objects, since the main social characteristics are determined by extremely short statistical series, since The social environment is currently quite changeable.

Recently, since the late 1970s, other types of fuzzy measures have been developed that have less strong restrictions on the nature of statistical data. Thus, they do not require the fulfillment of the axiom of continuity characteristic of a probability measure, which makes it possible to operate with short statistical series. True, the conclusions that can be obtained about the function of the object's behavior on the basis of such measures are less deterministic and reflect only one or another degree of trust, plausibility or possibility. The methodological apparatus for using such measures is still being developed, however, its application has already made it possible to obtain a number of practically significant results.

Cybernetics, according to Wiener, leads to "a whole group of problems concerning the organization, and it is in these areas that ... an essential part of its future lies." Wiener's predictions of this kind were partly justified, and the problems of organization and self-organization are now becoming the most relevant, which confirms the increased interest in these problems noted back in the late 1960s.

Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, to a Jewish family. At the age of nine, he entered a secondary school, where children of 15-16 years old began to study, having previously completed an eight-year school. He graduated from high school when he was eleven. Immediately entered the higher educational institution Tufts College. After graduating from it, at the age of fourteen, 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.

In the 1915/1916 academic year, Wiener taught mathematics at Harvard University as an assistant.

Viner spent the next academic year as an employee at the University of Maine. After the US entered the war, Wiener worked at the General Electric plant, from where he moved to the editorial office of the American Encyclopedia in Albany. In 1919, he joined the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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.

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. In 1926, D.Ya. came to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stroykh. Wiener, together with him, took up the application of the ideas of differential geometry to differential equations, including the Schrödinger equation.

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.

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. 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.

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In 1943, an article by Wiener, Rosenbluth, Byglow "Behavior, purposefulness and teleology" was published, which is an outline of the cybernetic method.

In Wiener's head, the idea had long been ripening to write a book and tell in it about the generality of the laws in force in the field of automatic regulation, the organization of production, and in the human nervous system. He managed to persuade the Parisian publisher Feyman to publish this future book.

Immediately there was a difficulty with the title, the content was too unusual. It was required to find a word related to management, regulation. The Greek word for "helmsman" came to mind, which in English sounds like "cybernetics". So Wiener left him.

The book was published in 1948 by John Wheely and Suns in New York and Hermann et Tsi in Paris. 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. Cybernetics is the science of information management, and Wiener can rightfully be considered the creator of this science.

All the years after the release of Cybernetics, Wiener propagated its ideas. In 1950, a sequel was published - "Human Use of Human Beings", in 1958 - "Nonlinear Problems in the Theory of Stochastic Processes", in 1961 - the second edition of "Cybernetics", in 1963 - a kind of cybernetic essay "Joint-Stock Company God and Golem" .

American mathematician, one of the founders of cybernetics (the first edition of the book of the same name took place in 1948, although the term itself "cybernetics" used before it Plato and Ampere).

Norbert was educated at home by his father Leo Viner- follower of ideas and translator L.N. Tolstoy, as well as , .

At the age of three, Norbert could read and write, and at the age of seven he could read Darwin and Dante. At the age of eleven he graduated from high school, at the age of 17 he became a master of arts, at 18 - a doctor of philosophy in the specialty "mathematical logic".

Norbert Wiener, working “... with engineers, doctors, biologists, he realized the deep inner unity of many tasks that arise in different fields. It turned out that many of the studied processes or designed systems are described by the same mathematical models and suggest similar ways of solving the tasks. Moreover, in many cases, the controlled or studied system can be considered as a “black box”, which, in response to these influences, gives quite definite reactions, regardless of what is inside this “box”. Moving along the path laid out N. Wiener, managed to introduce the concept of feedback, which is very important both for control theory and for other areas of knowledge, to build conceptual and mathematical models.

Kamenyuka S.V.

Plan

1. Biography of N. Wiener.

2. The first steps of cybernetics. Cybernetics by N. Wiener

2.1 N. Wiener - "godfather" of cybernetics

2.2 Cybernetics today

2.3 Technical cybernetics

3. Interaction between managed and control systems

4. N. Wiener awards.

5. Memory.

6. Publications and Russian editions of Wiener.

Literature

Biography of N. Wiener

Norbert Wiener was born into a Jewish family. The scientist's father, Leo Wiener (1862-1939), was born in the city of Bialystok of the Russian Empire, studied at the Minsk and then Warsaw gymnasium, entered the Berlin Institute of Technology, after finishing the second year of which he moved to the USA, where he eventually became a professor at the Department of Slavic Languages ​​and Literature at Harvard University. Mother's parents, Berta Kahn, were from Germany.

At the age of 4, Wiener was already admitted to his parents' library, and at the age of 7 he wrote his first scientific treatise on Darwinism. Norbert never really went to high school. But at the age of 11, he entered the prestigious Tufts College, which he graduated with honors in three years, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree.

At 18, Norbert Wiener received his Ph.D. in mathematical logic from Cornell and Harvard Universities. At the age of nineteen, Dr. Wiener was invited to the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1913, the young Wiener began his journey through Europe, listening to lectures by B. Russell and G. Hardy in Cambridge and D. Hilbert in Göttingen. After the outbreak of the war, he returns to America. While studying in Europe, the future "father of cybernetics" had to try his hand at the role of a journalist near the university newspaper, test himself in the teaching field, serve as an engineer at a factory for a couple of months.

In 1915, he tried to get to the front, but did not pass the medical examination due to poor eyesight.

Since 1919, Wiener became a teacher in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1920-1930 he again visits Europe. In the theory of radiative equilibrium of stars, the Wiener-Hopf equation appears. He lectures at Beijing Tsinghua University. Among his acquaintances are N. Bor, M. Born, J. Hadamard and other famous scientists.

In 1926 he married Margaret Engerman.

Before the Second World War, Wiener became a professor at Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, Göttingen Universities, received a chair at the Massachusetts Institute in his own undivided ownership, wrote hundreds of articles on probability theory and statistics, on Fourier series and integrals, on potential theory and number theory, on generalized harmonic analysis...

During the Second World War, for which the professor wished to be called, he worked on the mathematical apparatus for anti-aircraft fire guidance systems (deterministic and stochastic models for the organization and control of the American air defense forces). He developed a new effective probabilistic model for controlling air defense forces.

Wiener's "Cybernetics" was published in 1948. The full title of Wiener's main book is as follows: "Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine."

A few months before his death, Norbert Wiener was awarded the US National Medal of Science, the highest honor for a man of science in America. At the solemn meeting dedicated to this event, President Johnson said: "Your contribution to science is surprisingly versatile, your view has always been completely original, you are an amazing embodiment of the symbiosis of a pure mathematician and an applied scientist."

2. The first steps of cybernetics. Cybernetics n. Wiener

2.1 N. Wiener - "godfather" of cybernetics

Almost one hundred and fifty years ago, the French physicist and mathematician André Marie Ampère completed an extensive work - Essays on the Philosophy of Sciences. In it, the famous scientist tried to bring all human knowledge into a coherent system. Each of the sciences known at that time was given its place in the system. Under the heading number 83, Ampère placed the science he proposed, which should study the methods of governing society.

The scientist borrowed its name from the Greek language, in which the word "cybernetes" means "helmsman", "helmsman". And cybernetics in ancient Greece was called the art of navigation.

By the way, Ampere in his classification of sciences placed cybernetics in the section "Politics", which, as a science of the first order, was divided into sciences of the second and third orders. Ampère attributed "politics in the proper sense" to the second order, and he defined cybernetics, the science of management, as a science of the third order.

Each science had a motto in poetic form in Latin. Ampère accompanied cybernetics with such words, which sound very symbolic: "...et secura cives ut pace fruantur" ("...and provides citizens with the opportunity to enjoy the world").

For a long time after Ampère, scientists did not widely use the term "cybernetics". In essence, he was forgotten. But in 1948, the famous American mathematician Norbert Wiener published a book called Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in Living Organisms and Machines. It aroused great interest among scientists, although the laws that Wiener laid the foundation for cybernetics were discovered and studied long before the book appeared.

The cornerstones of cybernetics are information theory, the theory of algorithms, and automata theory, which studies how to build systems for processing information. The mathematical apparatus of cybernetics is very wide: here is the theory of probability, and the theory of functions, and mathematical logic, and many other branches of modern mathematics.

In the development of cybernetics, the biological sciences, which study control processes in living nature, also played an important role. But of course, the decisive factor in the development of the new science was the rapid growth of electronic automation and especially the emergence of high-speed computers. They opened up unprecedented possibilities in information processing and in the modeling of control systems.

Just as in music they strive to put all human feelings and moods on notes, so in cybernetics they strive to put all the situations that occur in nature, in our minds, on numbers.

Over the centuries, the work of mathematicians, physicists, physicians and engineers - scientists from different countries - laid the foundation and formed the fundamental foundations of cybernetics. Of outstanding importance for its development were the works of the American scientists C. Shannon and J. Neumann, and the ideas of our world-famous physiologist I. P. Pavlov. Historians note the merits of such outstanding engineers and mathematicians as I. A. Vyshnegradsky, A. M. Lyapunov, A. N. Kolmogorov. And it would be more correct to say that in 1948, not the birth, but the baptism of cybernetics, the science of control, took place. It was by this time that the question of improving the quality of management in our complicated world arose with the greatest urgency. And cybernetics gave specialists of various profiles the opportunity to apply precise scientific analysis to solve control problems.

The services of cybernetics began to be used by mathematicians and physicists, biologists, physiologists and psychiatrists, economists and philosophers, engineers of various specialties. They have a twofold interest in this science, so to speak. On the one hand - to develop and improve management processes in various areas of human activity, to increase the productivity of his labor. On the other hand, to strive to constantly, deeply and comprehensively study the objects of management, to find more and more new patterns to which management processes are subject, to reveal the principles of organization and structure of control systems. And inevitably, the living organism becomes the object of the closest study, the most detailed study: the person himself as a higher-type control system, certain functions of which engineers and scientists strive to reproduce in automata.