Kybernetes: Volume 29 Issue 7/8

The Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal address: Norbert Wiener and the idea of contingence

Ilya Prigogine

The Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal address delivered by the Nobel Laureate recipient. Considers Norbert Wiener and the idea of contingence. Refers to Wiener’s book The Human…

Abduction in language interpretation and law making

Evelyne Andreewsky, Danièle Bourcier

The complexity of any given cognitive phenomenon, such as “scientific discovery”, “technical expertise”, or “natural language understanding”, requires a multidisciplinary…

Frank H. George Memorial Lecture: Stone soup: identifying intelligence through construction

T.R. Addis

A strictly pragmatic stance is taken in asking the question “What features must be present that makes behaviour intelligent?” The Turing Test is shown to be insufficient to…

Frank H. George Research Award Winning Paper: Cybernetic approach to medical technology: application to cancer screening and other diagnostics

D. Dutta Majumder, M. Bhattacharya

The cybernetic approach differs significantly from the conventional reductionist methods of natural and biological sciences. Norbert Wiener established the theory of cybernetics…

Frank H. George Research Award winning paper Cancer self‐remission and tumour instability – a cybernetic analysis Towards a fresh paradigm for cancer treatment

D. Dutta Majumder, Prasun Kumar Roy

Aims to investigate the causative factors and clinical applicability of spontaneous regression of malignant tumours without treatment, a really paradoxical phenomenon with many…

Frank H. George Research Award – Highly Commended Paper: Eco‐cybernetics: the ecology and cybernetics of missing emergences

Donato Bergandi

Considers that in ecosystem, landscape and global ecology, an energetics reading of ecological systems is an expression of a cybernetic, systemic and holistic approach. In…

Methods for identification and control of models

Yves Cherruault

New methods for optimization and for solving nonlinear functional equations are given and are applied to the identification and optimal control of models coming from life sciences.

Self‐construction of desirable social systems

Raul Espejo

Social systems are produced by people’s interactions. They are by and large the outcome of self‐organising processes, which often produce undesirable properties like corruption…

Cybernetics Society’s Essay Competition 1999 – Highly Commended Paper: Cybernetic explanation and development

Bernard Scott

This essay reports work in cybernetics that it is believed can shed light on methodological and conceptual issues in the study of child development. To do so, cybernetics is…

The cybernetics of systems of belief

Bernard Scott

This paper reviews the proposal by D.J. Stewart of extending the cybernetics world view, where one is limited to just two ontological domains, those of “energy” and “information”…

A blackboard software architecture for integrated intelligent control systems

M.F. Abbod, D.A. Linkens, A. Browne, N. Cade

This paper describes a software architecture which supports the design of hierarchical controllers that provide facilities for adaptation, supervision and task planning. It…

Learning processes in a class of knowledge‐based systems

Z. Bubnicki

The paper is concerned with static plants described by a knowledge representation in the form of relations or logical formulas with unknown parameters. The learning algorithms…

Editorial preface – II

B.H. Rudall