Full mock test 1

There are many definitions of cybernetics and many individuals who have influenced the definition and direction of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, engineer and social philosopher, coined the word "cybernetics" from the Greek word meaning "steersman." He defined it as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Ampere, before him, wanted cybernetics to be the science of government. For philosopher Warren McCulloch, cybernetics was an experimental epistemology concerned with the communication within an observer and between the observer and his environment. Stafford Beer, a management consultant, defined cybernetics as the science of effective organization. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson noted that whereas previous sciences dealt with matter and energy, the new science of cybernetics focuses on form and pattern. For educational theorist Gordon Pask, cybernetics is the art of manipulating defensible metaphors, showing how they may be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence.  

CYBERNETICS: DEFINITIONS AND DESCRIPTIONS

1. "a science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control"-A.N. Kolmogorov
2. "Cybernetique= the art of growing"--A.M. Ampere
3. "the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine"-Norbert Wiener
4. "the art of securing efficient operation"-L. Couffignal
5. "the art of steersmanship"; "deals with all forms of behavior in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible"; "stands to the real machine-electronic, mechanical, neural, or economic-much as geometry stands to a real object in our terrestrial space"; "offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored"-W. Ross Ashby
6. "a branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information"-Gregory Bateson
7. "the science of effective organization"-Stafford Beer
8. "the art and science of manipulating defensible metaphors"-Gordon Pask
9. "Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity."-Heinz von Foerster
10. "a way of thinking"-Ernst von Glasersfeld
11. "the science and art of understanding"-Humberto Maturana
12. "Cybernetics: when I reflect on the dynamics of observed systems and on the dynamics of the observer-whence 'creative cybernetics': when I project the dynamics of a system I would like to observe"-from announcement of 1987 ASC conference in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
13. "the ability to cure all temporary truth of eternal triteness"-Herbert Brun