The Cybernetics Of Self Organisation Learning And Evolution

The Cybernetics of Self-organisation, Learning and Evolution

Cybernetics for the Social Sciences

Bernard Scott has met a long-felt need by authoring a book that shows the relevance of cybernetics for the social sciences (including psychology, sociology, and anthropology). Scott provides user-friendly descriptions of the core concepts of cybernetics, with examples of how they can be used in the social sciences. He explains how cybernetics functions as a transdiscipline that unifies other disciplines and a metadiscipline that provides insights about how other disciplines function. He provides an account of how cybernetics emerged as a distinct field, following interdisciplinary meetings in the 1940s, convened to explore feedback and circular causality in biological and social systems. He also recounts how encountering cybernetics transformed his thinking and his understanding of life in general.

Advances in Computers

The survey articles included in Volume 5 have been selected with two aims in mind: to arrive at a balanced sampling of the computer field, and to emphasize the subjects of most active current interest. Articles cover topics such as the role of computers in delivering election results; the state of computer development in the Soviet Union and its neighbors; artificial intelligence; and applications of computers to the design of optical instruments, to nuclear reactor design, and to the determination of the structure of crystals or molecules from X-ray diffraction patterns.