What is cybernetics?


Cybernetics
is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory. Both in its origins and in its evolution in the second-half of the 20th century, cybernetics is equally applicable to physical and social (that is, language-based) systems.

Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology in the 1940s, often attributed to the Macy Conferences.

Monday, March 9, 2009

GOFAI

In artificial intelligence research, GOFAI ("Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence") is an approach to achieving artificial intelligence. In the robotics research, the term is extended as GOFAIR ("Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence and Robotics"). The approach is based on the assumption that many aspects of intelligence can be achieved by the manipulation of symbols, an assumption defined as the "physical symbol systems hypothesis" by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon in the middle 1960s. The term "GOFAI" was coined by John Haugeland in his 1986 book Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea, which explored the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence research.

GOFAI was the dominant paradigm of AI research from the middle fifties until the late 1980s. After that time, newer sub-symbolic approaches to AI became popular. Now, both approaches are in common use, often applied to different problems.

Opponents of the symbolic approach include roboticists such as Rodney Brooks, who aims to produce autonomous robots without symbolic representation (or with only minimal representation) and computational intelligence researchers, who apply techniques such as neural networks and optimization to solve problems in machine learning and control engineering.



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