W. Ross Ashby
W. Ross Ashby | |
---|---|
Born | London, England | 6 September 1903
Died | 15 November 1972 | (aged 69)
Known for | Cybernetics, Law of Requisite Variety, Principle of Self-organization |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Psychiatry, Cybernetics, Systems theory |
Signature | |
William Ross Ashby (6 September 1903 – 15 November 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.[1]: 91
His two books, Design for a Brain and An Introduction to Cybernetics, introduced exact and logical thinking into the brand new discipline of cybernetics and were highly influential.[1]: 93 These "missionary works" along with his technical contributions made Ashby "the major theoretician of cybernetics after Wiener".[2][3]: 28
Early life and education
William Ross Ashby was born in 1903 in
Career
Ashby started working in 1930 as a Clinical Psychiatrist at the London County Council. From 1936 until 1947 he was a Research Pathologist at St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton in England. From 1945 to 1947 he served in India where he was a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps.[1]: 92
When he returned to England, he served as Director of Research of the
Ashby was president of the
Work
Despite being widely influential within
Journal
Ashby kept a journal for over 44 years in which he recorded his ideas about new theories. He started May 1928, when he was medical student at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Over the years, he wrote down a series of 25 volumes totaling 7,189 pages. In 2003, these journals were given to The British Library, London, and in 2008, they were made available online as The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive.[7] Ashby initially considered his theorizing a private hobby, and his later decision to begin publishing his work caused him some distress. He wrote:
My fear is now that I may become conspicuous, for a book of mine is in the press. For this sort of success I have no liking. My ambitions are vague—someday to produce something faultless.[1]: 97
Ashby found writing so difficult that he took correspondence courses in "Effective English and Personal Efficiency" to prepare to write his first book.[4]
Adaptation
Ashby was interested in mechanistic explanations for adaptive behavior, especially in the brain. By 1941, he had developed a coherent theory and written a 197-page booklet, titled "The Origin of Adaptation".[1]: 99 This hand-written monograph was made publicly available in January 2021.[8] In it, he expressed his opinion that "there is an abstract science of organisation, in the sense that there are laws, theories and discoveries to be made about organisation as such without asking what it is that is organised."[8]: 35
In 1948 Ashby built a machine, the
Cybernetics
Ashby was one of the original members of the
The title of his book An Introduction to Cybernetics popularised the usage of the term 'cybernetics' to refer to self-regulating systems, originally coined by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics. The book gave accounts of homeostasis, adaptation, memory and foresight in living organisms in Ashby's determinist, mechanist terms.[2]
Ashby's 1964 paper Constraint Analysis of Many-Dimensional Relations began the study of reconstructability analysis, a multivariate systems modeling methodology based on set theory and information theory, which would later be developed by Klaus Krippendorff, George Klir, and others.[11][3]: 287–288
In 1970, Ashby collaborated on simulation experiments regarding the stability of large interconnected systems.[12] This work inspired Robert May's studies of stability and complexity in model ecosystems.[13]
Variety
In An Introduction to Cybernetics, Ashby used set cardinality, or variety, as a measure of information. With this he formulated his Law of Requisite Variety. Mathematically, the law is a statement about how "in a two-person game the variety possible is determined by the number of possible choices open to the two players".[14] When regulation is seen as a game between a regulator and source of disturbances , "only variety in can force down the variety due to ; only variety can destroy variety."[15]: 207
In work with Ashby, Conant augmented this with the "
A popular paraphrasing of the law is "only complexity absorbs complexity". However, while a web search reveals many attributions to Ashby, it appears such attribution is in error. The phrase is not listed by the Cybernetics Society.[18]
Legacy
The Papers of William Ross Ashby are housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue.[19]
On 4–6 March 2004, a W. Ross Ashby centenary conference was held at the
Ashby's work on the law of requisite variety has influenced scholars within the field of management studies.[17]
Publications
- Books
- 1952. Design for a Brain, Chapman & Hall.
- 1956. An Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman & Hall.
- 1981. Conant, Roger C. (ed.). Mechanisms of Intelligence: Ross Ashby's Writings on Cybernetics, Intersystems Publishers.
- Articles, a selection
- 1940. "Adaptiveness and equilibrium". In: J. Ment. Sci. 86, 478.
- 1945. "Effects of control on stability". In: Nature, London, 155, 242–243.
- 1946. "The behavioural properties of systems in equilibrium". In: Amer. J. Psychol. 59, 682–686.
- 1947. "Principles of the Self-Organizing Dynamic System". In: Journal of General Psychology (1947). volume 37, pages 125–128.
- 1948. "The homeostat". In: Electron, 20, 380.
- 1962. "Principles of the Self-Organizing System". In: Heinz Von Foerster and George W. Zopf, Jr. (eds.), Principles of Self-Organization (Sponsored by Information Systems Branch, US Office of Naval Research). Republished as a PDF in Emergence: Complexity and Organization (E:CO) Special Double Issue Vol. 6, Nos. 1–2 2004, pp. 102–126.
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g Pickering, Andrew (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. London: University of Chicago Press.
- ^ a b Lilienfeld, Robert (1978). The Rise of Systems Theory: An Ideological Analysis. John Wiley & Sons. p. 35.
- ^ a b Klir, George (1985). Architecture of Systems Problem Solving. New York: Plenum Press.
- ^ a b c Biography of W. Ross Ashby The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, 2008.
- ^ Autobiographical summary, taken from Ashby's own notes, made about 1972.
- ^ Cosma Shalizi, W. Ross Ashby web page, 1999.
- ^ W. Ross Ashby Journal (1928–1972) The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, 2008.
- ^ a b W.R. Ashby, "The Origin of Adaptation", 1941, British Library, London. Available online: W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, 2021.
- ^ Alan Turing letter The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, 2008.
- ^ Wiener, Norbert (1954). The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society.
- .
- S2CID 4217071.
- S2CID 4262204.
- ^ George, F.H. (1971). Cybernetics. The English Universities Press Ltd.
- ^ Ashby, William Ross (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics (PDF). London: Chapman & Hall.
- ^ Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby, "Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system", International Journal of Systems Science vol 1 (1970), 89–97.
- ^ a b Beer, Stafford (1981). Brain of the Firm, 2nd Edition. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.
- ^ "What Ashby Says..." Retrieved 16 May 2014.
- ^ William Ross Ashby Papers, archives and manuscripts catalogue, the British Library. Retrieved 02 June 2020
- ^ W. Ross Ashby Centenary Conference The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, 2008
Further reading
- British Library Untold lives blog, 20 April 2016: Pioneering cybernetics: an introduction to W Ross Ashby.
- Asaro, Peter (2008). "From Mechanisms of Adaptation to Intelligence Amplifiers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby," in Michael Wheeler, Philip Husbands and Owen Holland (eds.) The Mechanical Mind in History, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
External links
- The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive includes an extensive biography, bibliography, letters, photographs, movies, and fully indexed images of all 7,189 pages of Ashby's 25 volume journal.
- Homepage of William Ross Ashby Archived 14 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine with a short text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Yearbook 1973, and some links.
- Asaro, Peter M. (2008). "From Mechanisms of Adaptation to Intelligence Amplifiers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby," in Michael Wheeler, Philip Husbands and Owen Holland (eds.) The Mechanical Mind in History, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 149–184.
- W. Ross Ashby web page by Cosma Shalizi, 1999.
- W. Ross Ashby (1956): An Introduction to Cybernetics, (Chapman & Hall, London): available electronically, Principia Cybernetica Web, 1999
- The Law of Requisite Variety Archived 8 October 2014 at the Principia Cybernetica Web, 2001.
- 159 Aphorisms from Ashby and further links at the Cybernetics Society
- W. Ross Ashby, Cybernetics and Requisite Variety (1956) from An Introduction to Cybernetics
- W. Ross Ashby, Feedback, Adaptation and Stability (1960) from Design for a Brain
- What is Cybernetics? on YouTubeLivas short introductory videos