cybernetics

n. science of communication and automatic control systems in relation to both machines and living things

Cybernetics was defined by Norbert Wiener, in his book of that title, as the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Stafford Beer called it the science of effective organization and Gordon Pask extended it to include information flows "in all media" from stars to brains. It includes the study of feedback, black boxes and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organizations including self-organization. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks . A more philosophical definition, suggested in 1956 by Louis Couffignal, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, characterizes cybernetics as "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action" .
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Noun
1. (biology) the field of science concerned with processes of communication and control (especially the comparison of these processes in biological and artificial systems)
(hypernym) information science, informatics, information processing, IP
(classification) biology, biological science

a study of the control processes in biological and artificial systems.  Cybernetics reduces the field to a system that maintains itself by the mutual influence of its parts.

<robotics> /si:`b*-net'iks/ The study of control and communication in living and man-made systems.
The term was first proposed by Norbert Wiener in the book referenced below. Originally, cybernetics drew upon electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, neurophysiology, anthropology, and psychology to study and describe actions, feedback, and response in systems of all kinds. It aims to understand the similarities and differences in internal workings of organic and machine processes and, by formulating abstract concepts common to all systems, to understand their behaviour.
Modern "second-order cybernetics" places emphasis on how the process of constructing models of the systems is influenced by those very systems, hence an elegant definition - "applied epistemology".
Related recent developments (often referred to as sciences of complexity) that are distinguished as separate disciplines are artificial intelligence, neural networks, systems theory, and chaos theory, but the boundaries between those and cybernetics proper are not precise.
See also robot.
The Cybernetics Society of the UK.
American Society for Cybernetics.
IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society.
International project "Principia Cybernetica".
Usenet newsgroup: sci.systems.
["Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine", N. Wiener, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1948]
(2002-01-01)