The content of cybernetics.

Cybernetics is a science that studies the regulation laws of various systems. It is an interdisciplinary subject formed by the mutual penetration of automatic control, communication technology, computer science, mathematical logic, neurophysiology, statistical mechanics and behavioral science. It studies the communication and control process between objects and machines and various matrix systems, discusses the principles of information exchange, feedback adjustment, self-organization and self-adaptation, and the mechanism of improving system behavior and making the system run stably, thus forming a set of concepts, models, principles and methods suitable for various sciences. Weiner, the founder of cybernetics, pointed out in the subtitle of his book Cybernetics that cybernetics is "the science of control and communication in animals and machines".

The word Cybernetics, which comes from Greek, is willing to take the helm and contains many meanings such as regulation, manipulation, management, command and supervision. Wiener took it as the name of a new discipline he founded, which means that it can avoid being too biased, "unable to meet the future development of this field" and "commemorating the first important paper of feedback institutions".

Cybernetics is the product of the synthesis of many sciences and the crystallization of the cooperation of many scientists. However, the birth and development of cybernetics is related to the name of American mathematician norbert wiener.

Wiener was a prodigy when he was a teenager. He went to college at the age of 1 1 and studied mathematics, but he loved physics, radio, biology and philosophy. 14 years old, admitted to Harvard graduate school to study zoology, and then went to study philosophy. /kloc-at the age of 0/8, he obtained a doctorate in mathematical logic from Harvard University. Wiener, 19 13 just graduated and went to Europe to study mathematics with Russell and Hilbert. It was in his mind that the integration of many disciplines produced the comprehensive results of cybernetics. When Wiener studied Lebesgue integral in 19 19, cybernetics sprouted from statistical physics. During World War II, he participated in the development of American air defense fire automatic control system, put forward the concept of negative feedback, and applied the functional simulation method, which played a decisive role in the birth of cybernetics. 1943, Wiener, Bigelow and Rosenblat co-authored the paper "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology", which studied purposeful behavior from the perspective of feedback and found the consistency between nervous system and automata. This is the first paper on cybernetics. At this time, neurophysiologist Pitts cooperated with mathematical logicians to create a neural network model by using feedback mechanism. Aiken and von Neumann, the designers of the first generation of electronic computers, thought these ideas were very important for the design of electronic computers, so they suggested that Wiener hold a seminar on information and feedback. At the end of 1943, such a meeting was held in new york. Among the participants, biologists, mathematicians, sociologists and economists expressed their views on information feedback from their own perspectives. Later, such seminars were jointly held, which promoted the emergence of cybernetics. 1948 The publication of Wiener's cybernetics announced the birth of this science.

The research of cybernetics shows that no matter what their qualitative characteristics are, automatic machine, nervous system, life system, economic system and social system can be regarded as an automatic control system. In this system, there is a special regulating device to control the operation of the system and maintain its own stability and the purpose and function of the system. The control mechanism sends instructions as control information to all parts of the system (that is, the controlled object), and then they follow the instructions and feed back as feedback information, which will be used as the basis for determining the next regulation.

In this way, we can see that the whole control process is a process of information circulation, and control is realized through information transmission, conversion, processing and processing. Feedback plays a decisive role in the control and stability of the system. Whether the organism maintains its own dynamic stability (such as the stability of temperature and blood pressure) or the machine automatically maintains the stability of its own function, it is achieved through the feedback mechanism. Feedback is the core problem of cybernetics. Cybernetics is to study how to use the controller to make the system run automatically according to the predetermined program through information transformation and feedback, and finally achieve the optimal goal.

Cybernetics is a scientific theory with methodological significance. The theory and viewpoint of cybernetics can be a scientific method to study various scientific problems, that is, to put aside the material points of various sciences, regard them as a control system, and analyze their information flow, anti-mechanism and control principle, and often find a way to make the system reach the best state. This method is called control method. The main methods of cybernetics are information method, feedback method, function simulation method and black box method. Information method regards the research object as an information system, and grasps the law of things by analyzing the information flow of the system. Feedback method is a research method to analyze and deal with problems by using feedback control principle. Feedback control is a process in which the re-output of control information sent by the controller affects the realization of the predetermined goals of the system. Positive feedback can amplify the control function and realize self-organizing control. But it also increases the deviation and leads to oscillation. Negative feedback can correct deviation and realize stable control, but it weakens the control function and wastes energy. Functional simulation method is a method to simulate the function and behavior of object prototype with functional model. The so-called functional model is a model based only on the similarity of functional behavior. For example, the process of hunter aiming at prey is similar to the functional behavior of automatic gun system, but their internal structure and physical process are completely different, which is a functional simulation. Functional simulation provides a scientific method for bionics, artificial intelligence and value engineering. Black box method is also the main method of cybernetics. Black box refers to those systems that can't open the box cover and observe the internal state from the outside. Black box method is a research method to understand the system function by investigating the input-output relationship of the system. It is an important tool to explore complex large-scale systems.

After the birth of cybernetics, it has been widely used and developed rapidly, and has experienced three development periods. The first period was the 1950s, which was a period of classical cybernetics. The representative work of this period is "Engineering Cybernetics" published by Qian Xuesen, a famous Chinese scientist, in the United States in 1945. The second period is the modern cybernetic period in the 1960s. With the development of missile system, artificial satellite and biological system, the emphasis of cybernetics has shifted from univariate control to multivariable control, from automatic adjustment to optimal control, and from linear system to nonlinear system. The state space method proposed by American Kalman and the maximum principle and dynamic programming proposed by other scholars have formed modern control theories such as system identification, optimal control, self-organization and adaptive system. The third period is the period of large-scale system theory after 1970s. Cybernetics has developed from engineering cybernetics and biological cybernetics to economic cybernetics and social cybernetics. 1975 the third international conference on cybernetics and system theory, the topic of discussion is economic cybernetics. 1978 in the fourth issue, the theme turned to social cybernetics. With the wide application of electronic computers and the development of artificial intelligence research, the control system has the characteristics of large scale, complex structure, many factors and comprehensive functions, so cybernetics has also developed into a large-scale system theory. At the academic conference of the International Federation of Automatic Control 1976, the topic of "Theory and Application of Large-scale Systems" was discussed. Cybernetics also formed engineering cybernetics and biology. Among them, biological cybernetics is divided into neurocybernetics, medical cybernetics, artificial intelligence research and bionics research. Social cybernetics applies cybernetics to social production management, efficient transportation, power network, energy engineering, environmental protection, urban suggestions and even social decision-making. Wiener 1950 published the book "People are Useful-Cybernetics and Society", focusing on the relationship between communication, law, social policy and cybernetics. The article "Application of Cybernetics in Biology and Society" published by Ashibe in 1958 holds that the control theory of nonlinear systems can be used to study social systems.

Cybernetics has very important theoretical and practical significance, which embodies the overall development trend of modern science and provides new ideas and scientific methods for modern science and technology. I began to translate and introduce cybernetics in the early 1960s, but it was not until recent years that I began to conduct extensive and in-depth research on it. In economy, population, energy and production management. Cybernetics is used to build mathematical models. Such as input-output model and population model, have achieved good results in application.