Feedback control and requisite variety, artificial life and emergent systems, and evolutionary computation — the study of regulation and adaptation in animal, machine, and organisation alike.
Norbert Wiener coined "cybernetics" — from the Greek kybernetes , helmsman — to name a field he saw cutting across engineering, biology, and the emerging science of computing: the study of control and communication in…
Feedback Control and Requisite Variety covers cybernetics' regulation half — a system steering itself toward a known goal. This page covers its other founding thread: what happens when many simple parts, each following…
Artificial Life and Emergent Systems covers complex behaviour emerging from simple, fixed local rules. Evolutionary computation borrows a different, equally simple natural process — not fixed rules, but a population…