"The Main Features of Cybernetics" () was a key text which led to the emergence of

cybernetics in the Soviet Union Cybernetics in the Soviet Union had its own particular characteristics, as the study of cybernetics came into contact with the dominant scientific ideologies of the Soviet Union and the nation's economic and political reforms: from the unmitig ...

, published in July–August 1955 volume of the state philosophical organ, '' Voprosy filosofii'' (Problems of Philosophy), No. 4. pp. 136–148. The article was attributed to three significant soviet scientists,

Sergei Sobolev Prof Sergei Lvovich Sobolev, FRSE (; 6 October 1908 – 3 January 1989) was a Soviet Union, Soviet mathematician working in mathematical analysis and partial differential equations. Sobolev introduced notions that are now fundamental for severa ...

Alexey Lyapunov Alexey Andreyevich Lyapunov (; 8 October 1911 – 23 June 1973) was a Soviet mathematician and an early pioneer of computer science. One of the founders of Soviet cybernetics, Lyapunov was member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union ...

, and

Anatoly Kitov Anatoly Ivanovich Kitov (9 August 1920 – 14 October 2005) was a pioneer of cybernetics in the Soviet Union. Early life and education Anatoly Kitov was born in Samara in 1920. The Kitov family moved to Tashkent in 1921, as Anatoly's father ...

and, for the first time, presented the tenets of cybernetics to a Soviet audience. Alongside the article "What is Cybernetics" by Ernst Kolman, published in the same volume, Benjamin Peters has considered this article to have "set the stage for the revolution of cybernetics in the Soviet Union". Kitov was the principal author. He had been delivering a number of lectures about cybernetics since 1953. He negotiated with Sobolev and Lyapunov to become joint authors, which they eventually agreed to. The article outlined three areas of cybernetics: * Information theory, principally statistical approaches to processing and transmission of messages. * The theory of automatic high-speed electronic calculating machines – computers as the theory of self-organizing logical processes. * The theory of automatic control systems, principally

feedback Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause and effect that forms a circuit or loop. The system can then be said to ''feed back'' into itself. The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handle ...

theory. A political point was added at the end of the article: :"Foreign reactionary philosophers and writers strive to use cybernetics, like any new scientific field, in their class interests. By intensively advertising and often exaggerating the statements of individual cybernetic scientists concerning the achievements and prospects of the development of automation, reactionary journalists and writers carry out a direct order from the capitalists to inspire ordinary people to consider their own inferiority, about the possibility of replacing ordinary workers with mechanical robots and thus they seek to reduce the activity of the working masses in the fight against capitalist exploitation. :We must resolutely expose this manifestation of a hostile ideology. Automation in a socialist society serves to facilitate and increase human productivity."

Impact

The mathematician

Victor Glushkov Victor Mikhailovich Glushkov (; August 24, 1923 – January 30, 1982) was a Soviet computer scientist. He is considered to be the founding father of information technology in the Soviet Union and one of the founding fathers Soviet cybernetics. ...

was living in Sverdlovsk when he read the article along with Kitov's book ''Electronic digital machines''. He saw the importance of cybernetics as being in relationship to computer science, and started leading a team working on the "Kiev Computer". Rather than seeing the computers as just a big adding machine, Glushkov approach meant working on areas which came to be called

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

Text

Основные черты кибернетики
On-line Russian language copy of the text made available by Virtual Computer Museum.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Main Features of Cybernetics, The Cybernetics