Cybernetics was from the first an inter-disciplinary field of study. It included people from at least a dozen academic disciplines. There were two events which sparked it off after World War II. The first was that scientists from different backgrounds had, during the war, worked together on various military projects. They learned a good deal about how to cooperate with their various partners. The second event was the invention of computers during the war.
The countries which started cybernetics were Britain and the United States, but the idea spread quickly to France, Russia and other countries. Another, more famous, example of 'interdisciplinary studies' was molecular and cell biology.
Imagine a simple system such as a central heating system.
A goal-directed or control system has these four parts:
The device which does this is called a thermostat.
Cybernetics started rapidly, and some of the greatest thinkers of the post-war era were interested in it. When this generation died, and some of the hopes for artificial intelligence and robotics were slow to produce results, cybernetics fell somewhat out of favour.
Complexity
Complexity is a property of something with many parts and a complicated arrangement. It is also the state of being complex. Its opposite is simplicity. In science, complexity is also the name for systems science.
Complex system
A complex system is one where smaller elements make complex things happen. These smaller elements can be simple elements or they can be complex systems within themselves. Any such complex elements can be interrelated in simple or complex ways and may be hard to identify as distinct.
'Complex systems' is a field which studies the common properties of systems considered complex in nature, society and science. It is also called "complex systems theory", "complexity science", "study of complex systems" and/or "sciences of complexity".
The key problems of such systems are difficulties with their formal modeling and simulation. From such perspective, in different research contexts complex systems are defined on the base of their different attributes.
Control theory
Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics. It deals with the behavior of systems. The desired output of a system is called the "reference". In that context, a system can be influenced by certain input values. Depending on the input values, the system may change its state or its behavior. Common questions control theory asks:
One of the first modern people to talk about control theory was James Clerk Maxwell. In his work On Governors, of 1868, he looked at the dynamic properties of centrifugal governors, as they were used by steam engines. Such governors were already used to regulate the speed of windmills.
A system is a model used to describe the behaviour of something in the real world that takes inputs and produces outputs. For example, a car is a system in that the driver chooses how hard to press on the gas pedal (the input) and the car drives along the road at a certain speed (the output). In the case of a car, the input to the gas pedal does not fully determine the speed of the car. The weight in the car, the incline of the road, the traction of the tires, the current speed of the car, and other factors can all change the output received for a particular input. Control theory attempts to determine what inputs will result in a desired output, or reference. This is accomplished using differential equations, linear algebra, and other branches of math. Control theory relies heavily on computational models and software.
In a control system a controller manipulates the inputs to a system. In the control systems one or more output variables of a system need to follow a certain reference over time. By manipulating the input, the controller wants to obtain the desired effect on the output of the system. If we were to take a system without a controller it would simply have an input and an output. As there is no way to track the output relative to the input then the system is practically useless. If we add a controller, by feeding the output through the controller back to the input the output can be manipulated to meet the desired criteria. For example, if a kettle did not have a controller and it were switched on it would continue to boil the water indefinitely. By adding a controller, the boiling water (reference) is fed back to the input through the controller. The controller then tells the input to turn off the power as the water is already boiling. The system without the controller is called the open-loop system. When you add a controller in a feedback loop you create a closed-loop system. Open-loop systems are rarely ever considered stable as they cannot be controlled based on their output. Closed-loop systems incorporate a controller or series of controllers which, depending on the current output, configure the input such that the output will have the desired response.
Acura
Acura is the luxury brand of the car company Honda. It has been used in the United States, Canada and Hong Kong since March 1986. The brand has been used to market Honda's luxury cars and high performance models. Before Acura, most Japanese cars were economical in design.
Cabal Online
Cabal Online is a free Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) created by ESTsoft Corporation.
There are eight characters players can choose from in Cabal Online. They are: Warrior, Blader, Magician, Force Archer, Force Blader, Force Shielder, Force Gunner and Gladiator.
Blackletter
Blackletter or Gothic script is an old way to write. Blackletter in writing or print was used in Western Europe from about 1150 to the 17th century. It was used for printing in Germany until the 20th century.
Letter shapes in printing were copied from letter shapes in a style of handwriting. So, the Gothic script of northern Europe and the Latin script used in Italy were both copied into print typography.
Some people call blackletter Old English. This is not right, because Old English is a language, not a script, and many centuries older. Also "Gothic" script has nothing to do with the Goths. They lived in central Europe from the 3rd to 6th century and wrote in runes. Blackletter must not be confused either with the ancient Gothic alphabet or with the sans-serif typefaces that are also sometimes called "Gothic".
The term "Gothic" was first used to describe this script in fifteenth century Italy, in the midst of the Renaissance. Scholars thought it was a barbaric script: "Gothic" was a synonym for "barbaric".
Not only were blackletter forms called "Gothic script", but any other seemingly barbarian script was also labeled "Gothic". In contrast, the humanists preferred the Carolingian minuscule, a highly legible script. They called it "littera antiqua", "the ancient letter", believing that it was the script used by the Romans. But actually it was invented in the reign of Charlemagne.
Carolingian minuscule was the direct and linear ancestor of blackletter. Blackletter came from Carolingian when Europe in the twelfth century needed new books in many different subjects when more and more people learned to read. New universities were founded, each writing books for business, law, grammar, history, and other topics, not only religious books, where earlier scripts were used.
These books needed to be produced quickly to keep up with demand. Carolingian, though legible, was time-consuming and labour-intensive to produce. It was large and wide and took up a lot of space on a manuscript in a time when writing materials were very costly. As early as the eleventh century, different forms of Carolingian were already being used, and by the mid-twelfth century, a clearly distinguishable form, able to be written more quickly to meet the demand for new books, was being used in north-eastern France and the Low Countries.
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