Page 21 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

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A NEW SCIENCE

NORBERT WIENER AND CYBERNETICS

y the 20th century, people had developed many sophisticated
Bdevices, ranging from steam engines and elaborate manufactur-
ing equipment to intricate telegraph and telephone networks. The
more complicated the machine, the harder it is to control. As a
result, there was an increasing effort to create automatic control-
and-switching systems that could prevent freight trains from col-
liding or route telephone calls across hundreds of miles. Further,
the challenges of 20th-century warfare would bring the need for
systems that could, for example, allow antiaircraft guns to track
and predict a bomber’s path.
Only electronic circuits that could react at the speed of light
would prove to be fast enough to respond to these challenges. But
even as engineers created new electronics applications, scientists
found they were lacking a comprehensive theory that could explain
how signals—information—flowed between machines and their
environment. Without such a theory, engineers were finding that
controls were not behaving as expected—for example, an automatic
antiaircraft gun would often slew back and forth rather than lock-
ing on to the target plane.
Gaining a true understanding of communications and control
systems would require contributions from biology (particularly
neurophysiology), new forms of mathematics, and the emerging
field of digital computing design. One mathematician, Norbert
Wiener, would draw insights from these and other fields together,
creating a new science that he would call cybernetics. In turn,

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