The Main Features of Cybernetics
"The Main Features of Cybernetics" was a key text which led to the emergence of cybernetics in the Soviet Union, published in July–August 1955 volume of the state philosophical organ, Voprosy filosofii, No. 4. pp. 136–148. The article was attributed to three significant soviet scientists, Sergei Sobolev, Alexey Lyapunov, and Anatoly Kitov and, for the first time, presented the tenets of cybernetics to a Soviet audience. Alongside the article "What is Cybernetics" by Ernst Kolman, published in the same volume, Benjamin Peters has considered this article to have "set the stage for the revolution of cybernetics in the Soviet Union".
Kitov was the principal author. He had been delivering a number of lectures about cybernetics since 1953. He negotiated with Sobolev and Lyapunov to become joint authors, which they eventually agreed to.
The article outlined three areas of cybernetics:
- Information theory, principally statistical approaches to processing and transmission of messages.
- The theory of automatic high-speed electronic calculating machines – computers as the theory of self-organizing logical processes.
- The theory of automatic control systems, principally feedback theory.
Impact
The mathematician Victor Glushkov was living in Sverdlovsk when he read the article along with Kitov's book Electronic digital machines. He saw the importance of cybernetics as being in relationship to computer science, and started leading a team working on the "Kiev Computer". Rather than seeing the computers as just a big adding machine, Glushkov approach meant working on areas which came to be called artificial intelligence.Text
- On-line Russian language copy of the text made available by Virtual Computer Museum.