cybernetics
    n 1: (biology) the field of science concerned with processes of
         communication and control (especially the comparison of
         these processes in biological and artificial systems)

cybernetics

    /si:`b*-net'iks/ The study of control and
   communication in living and man-made systems.

   The term was first proposed by Norbert Wiener in the book
   referenced below.  Originally, cybernetics drew upon
   electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, neurophysiology,
   anthropology, and psychology to study and describe actions,
   feedback, and response in systems of all kinds.  It aims to
   understand the similarities and differences in internal
   workings of organic and machine processes and, by formulating
   abstract concepts common to all systems, to understand their
   behaviour.

   Modern "second-order cybernetics" places emphasis on how the
   process of constructing models of the systems is influenced by
   those very systems, hence an elegant definition - "applied
   epistemology".

   Related recent developments (often referred to as sciences of
   complexity) that are distinguished as separate disciplines
   are artificial intelligence, neural networks, systems
   theory, and chaos theory, but the boundaries between those
   and cybernetics proper are not precise.

   See also robot.

   <The Cybernetics Society> of the UK.

   <American Society for Cybernetics>.

   <IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society>.

   <International project "Principia Cybernetica">.

   ["Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the
   machine", N. Wiener, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1948]

   (2002-01-01)