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Themesicon: navigation pathAesthetics of the Digitalicon: navigation pathArt/Science
 
 
 
 
 

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researchers were inspired to empirically confirm or disprove it by building machines.

Communication

The approach of cybernetics—a name derived from the Greek term ‹kybernetes› (steersman)—consists in transferring the theory of control and message transmission, whether in the machine or in a living being, to the fields of communication and machine control. The objective is to investigate the relationships between animal and machine, and in the case of the machine the specific mode of its behavior, as a characteristic of the performance to be expected. [14]

On the basis of the observation of certain analogies between machines and living organisms, the mathematician asserts that no reason actually exists not to make a machine resemble a human being, since one and the other develop tendencies toward decreasing entropy, meaning that both are examples of local anti-entropic phenomena.

Turing likewise conceded priority to the subject of communication. His famous experiment—the imitation

 

game, as he called it, also known as the Church-Turing thesis or Turing Theorem—for verifying the intelligence of a computer was concerned less with the actual construction of such a machine than with simulating with machines the human capability of communication. Turing was here acting in line with a tradition of measuring the faculty of thought by the ability to use human language. Descartes had already presented the logically semantic usage of language as a criterion for identifying thinking beings. For a long time, the mastery of semantics would remain a basic problem of Artificial Intelligence.

Information

In contrast to that tradition Wiener’s cybernetics sought operational ways of developing a specific language that would enable communication between dissimilar systems, and aimed to adapt semantics to specific goals in the process. Viewed from this perspective, Wiener’s theory replaced the notion of energy with that of information as the elementary parameter of communication, and thus postulated the definition of this new invariant for cybernetic science

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