I. Technical Content and National Context
When it appeared in 1953, the Russian translation of the
“Mathematical Theory of Communication” hardly read like the same text
written in English by Claude Shannon a few years before.
[1] Purged of any trace of man-machine analogies, the translation
portrayed communications engineering as an ideologically neutral technical
field. The Russian editor replaced Shannon’s original title with the
Russian, “The Statistical Theory of Electrical Signal Transmission,”
and he rid the work of the words “information,” “communication,” and
“mathematical” entirely, put “entropy” in quotation marks, and substituted
“data” for “information” throughout the text. The editor assured the
reader (and the censor) that Shannon’s concept of “entropy” had nothing
to do with physical entropy and was called such only on the basis of
“purely superficial similarity of mathematical formulae.”
[2] Thus the editor carefully avoided the anthropomorphic connotations
of the words information and communication and at the same time distanced
the use of the term “entropy” in the text from its controversial discussions
in physics and biology. Trying to avoid any reference to the links between
information theory and linguistics, the cautious editor even removed
the entire third section of Shannon’s paper, the one dealing with the
statistical analysis of natural language. The editor drew a sharp line
between what he called ideologically deficient, pseudo-scientific attempts
to “transfer the rules of radio communication to biological and psychological
phenomena” and the practically useful, firmly scientific statistical
theory of electrical signal transmission.
[3] His discursive strategy was simple: to portray information
theory as a purely technical tool with no connection to the ideology-laden
biological and social sciences. The translation typified Soviet communications
engineers' attempts to remove ideology from their work to place emphasis
on technical applications of information theory rather than its potential
conceptual innovations.
This translation of Shannon's work occurred at the time
of the Soviet anti-cybernetics campaign, about which more will be said
later in this paper. Taken on its own, however, the episode points to
the charged relationship of information theory, and its cold-war cousin,
cybernetics, to ideology and the social sciences in the cultural and
political worlds of the 1940s and 50s. In both cases, highly technical
theories put forward by mathematicians acquired ideological baggage
which some took up with enthusiasm and others vehemently rejected. In
both cases, claims were made for the broader significance of the work
outside the technical realms in which they originated, although the
authors participated in this process to differing degrees. Norbert Wiener
explicitly expanded his theory of prediction and smoothing to a universal
science, an extrapolation Claude Shannon always resisted for his information
theory. French scientists took up cybernetics and information theory,
at least in part, because of their perceived ideological implications.
In contrast, Shannon's Russian editors clearly thought they could distinguish
between the political and cultural implications of information theory
and the raw, technical content which concerned transmission of signals
through noisy channels.
A cross-national comparison of the generation and reception
of the two new sciences reveals how they acquired, shaped, and in were
formed by the cultures in which they were embedded. In the United States,
information theory and cybernetics emerged out of highly technical,
but also irreducibly social, military problems presented by World War
II. In his post war Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener attempted to
abstract his mathematics out of the technical culture which gave birth
to it and simultaneously to extend its reach beyond technology into
biology, economics, and social systems. Claude Shannon, with a less
ambitious but more analytically specific theory, made more modest claims
but with equally broad implications: his theory of entropy and channel
capacity could model not only technical communications but also human
language, and hence a broad array of human activities. In France, commentators
and scientists variously saw these new American sciences as bourgeois
conjecture, full of mythology and mystification, or as exciting meta-theories
capable of uniting diverse disciplines. Similarly, in Russia, an early
anti-cybernetics campaign saw Shannon and Wiener's work as embodiments
of idealist, reactionary, American pseudoscience. After Stalin's death,
however, Russian scientists made a complete reversal of their attitude
toward the two new sciences. They extracted from information theory
“natural laws” of information processing and made cybernetic feedback
the foundation of a dialectical description of language and society.
Following initial skepticism and discussion, cybernetics was institutionalized
in Europe in a way it never was in the United States.
In the pages that follow we examine the conception of information
theory and cybernetics in the United States and their relationship to
the technical cultures within which Shannon and Wiener worked. Then
we move on to their reception in France, and how ensuing debates shaped
significant French contributions to the information sciences. Similarly,
in Russia we trace how an initial ideological hostility transformed
into grudging acceptance and then total embrace. As with any such story,
the choice of origins is somewhat arbitrary, as both Shannon and Wiener
had important influences from France, Russia, and elsewhere, but the
two formed significant nodes in ongoing international networks of mathematics.
In the interests of analytical simplicity and brevity, we do allow some
slippage between information theory and cybernetics, as did the actors
under study, though the relationship between them is worthy of a study
in its own right.
In all these debates, and indeed in the subsequent history,
the essence of cybernetics and information theory prove hard to pin
down. Were they embodiments of an American, overarching military-industrial
mindset, or new sciences of everything? The intellectual equivalents
of the Marshall Plan, or useful new descriptions of electrical signals?
Did Shannon and Wiener represent the antecedents of computer science,
or an updated expression of Taylorist industrial rationality? Information
theory and cybernetics were, perhaps, all of these things and none of
them. Their very malleability makes a cross-national comparison worthwhile,
as it highlights the difficulty of culling discrete political messages
from mathematics, and also the difficulty of harvesting a pure, apolitical
mathematics from its historical soil.
II. The Origins of Cybernetics:
Expanding Control
Norbert Wiener, in his 1948 book Cybernetics: or Control
and Communication in the Animal and the Machine articulated the
marriage of communication and control for a generation of engineers,
systems theorists, and technical enthusiasts of varied stripes. Wiener
declared the merger occurred instantly, obviously and completely in
the course of his work on antiaircraft prediction devices. “I think
that I can claim credit,” Wiener wrote in his memoir, “...for transferring
the whole theory of the servomechanism bodily to communication engineering.” [4] Recently, historians have revisited this account, exploring
the genesis of Wiener’s project, its roots in his earlier work, and
its short-term failure and profound long-term effects. But these views
center on Wiener: the academic, the intellectual, and the mathematician;
they tend not to address his connection to a broader technical culture. [5]
Indeed we have little historical understanding of cybernetics
in relation to engineering practice in control, computing, electronics,
and communications. Some things were genuinely new about the human/machine
relationship articulated by cybernetics, others were derived from existing
ideas in engineering. Wiener’s cybernetics emerged from the world of
automation, military command, and computing during and after World War
II. Wiener’s own work on control systems during the war existed within
a set of projects and a technical agenda which aimed to automate human
performance in battle through a tight coupling of people and machines.
Indeed before Wiener’s cybernetics, American technology was already
suffused with what would later be called “cybernetic” ideas. Several
strong pre-war traditions of feedback mechanisms — including regulators
and governors, industrial process controls, military control systems,
feedback electronics, and a nascent academic discipline of control theory
— suggests a broader and more gradual convergence of communications
and control than the strict “Wienerian” account.
[6] Servo engineers turned to techniques common in the telephone
network to characterize the behavior of powerful feedback devices. Radar
engineers adapted communications theory to deal with noise in tracking.
Human operators were always necessary but problematic components of
automatic control systems. Military technologists had wrestled with
the notion of prediction since at least the turn of the century. These
were but a few of the features of the technological terrain onto which
Norbert Wiener stepped in 1940 when he began working on control systems.
Yet Wiener eventually presented cybernetics as a specifically scientific
discourse of communication and control, distinct from its practitioners.
Like Shannon's Russian translator, Wiener attempted to divorce the content
of his work from its social soil, and to embed it in a different tradition.
A. The NDRC and the fire
control problem
In 1940 Vannevar Bush formed the National Defense Research
Committee (or NDRC), to bring university and industrial research to
bear on military problems. Led by Warren Weaver, then also head of the
Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, the NDRC established
a committee, called section D-2, responsible for control systems. Under
this committee, control engineers developed the technology, indeed the
practical philosophy, that Wiener would articulate so effectively in
his postwar writing on cybernetics. During the war, much of that philosophy
coalesced around difficult problems of antiaircraft fire control. Using
artillery to hit fast-moving airplanes pressed to its limits the engineering
knowledge of dynamic performance, mathematical precision, corrupted
data, and the human operator. Research in data smoothing and prediction
— two key elements of fire control — began to formalize an engineering
approach based on abstracting the physical world and manipulating it
as electrical signals, the basis of later strategies of computing and
information processing. Engineering practice evolved in parallel with
this theoretical work, and sometimes preceded it.
Weaver's control systems committee brought institutional
pressure to bear on communications and control; it placed dual emphasis
on Bell Labs, temple of communications, and MIT, which had a strong
program in feedback control and servomechanisms (a servomechanism
or servo is an electric or hydraulic motor that, with the addition
of a feedback loop, is able to precisely hold and control its position).
During the war, the NDRC control systems committee funded eighty research
contracts in feedback theory, devices, and computing, totaling about
$10 million at Bell Labs, MIT, and a number of other academic and industrial
laboratories. Nearly every American computer pioneer (Atanasoff, Eckert
& Mauchly, Shannon, Stibitz) of the time worked on at least one
of these contracts during the war. Two of the eighty projects funded
Norbert Wiener at MIT. [7]
Wiener had studied electrical networks during the 1930s
and in 1940 he proposed to apply network theory to servo engineering.
This work had already been done by Henrik Bode at Bell Labs, however,
so by late 1940, the NDRC asked Wiener to bring his knowledge of networks
to prediction in fire control. This tricky problem required anticipating
the future position of a target aircraft so an antiaircraft gun could
lead the target and hit it with a shell, after some finite delay of
the shell's time of flight (as much as one minute for high flying aircraft).
Wiener simulated a prediction network on MIT’s calculating machine,
the Differential Analyzer, and showed encouraging results. On December
1, 1940 the NDRC let a contract to MIT for “General Mathematical Theory
of Prediction and Applications.” For the contract, Wiener and his assistant,
engineer Julian Bigelow, would devise a theory to follow a given curve,
chosen to represent the path of an airplane, and estimate the value
of that curve at some time in the future. During early 1941 the two
designed and built a machine to simulate their ideas on prediction. [8]
Wiener and Bigelow quickly ran into a stability problem.
Wiener’s network was highly sensitive, even unstable, in the presence
of high frequency noise. [9]
This was a cousin of the stability problem facing other engineering
disciplines which dealt with feedback loops — transient inputs caused
oscillations. Wiener quickly realized the problem was fundamental, “in
the order of things,” (he compared it to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle)
and that he would need a new approach. He and Bigelow now turned to
statistics, designing a new predictor based on “a statistical analysis
of the correlation between the past performance of a function of time
and its present and future performance.” The new network continually
updated its own prediction as time passed and it compared the target’s
flight path with previous guesses. A feedback network converged on guesses
which minimized this error. [10] In modern terms, this device
might be described as a one-dimensional neural network, which learned
about the world as it gathered new data.
Through the remainder of 1941, Wiener worked out in detail
the theory behind his statistical approach, scribbling on a blackboard
as Bigelow took notes. Warren Weaver agreed that Wiener's theory could
produce an optimal predictor and let another NDRC contract for Wiener
to write up his theoretical results.
[11] The product of that contract, Wiener’s report, Extrapolation,
Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series, was published
by the NDRC for restricted circulation in early 1942. Here Wiener explicitly
brought together statistics and communications theory with engineering
of high power systems,
In that moment in which circuits of large power are used
to transmit a pattern or to control the time behavior of a machine,
power engineering differs from communication engineering only in the
energy levels involved and in the particular apparatus used suitable
for such energy levels, but is not in fact a separate branch of engineering
from communications. [12]
Building on his own work in harmonic analysis and operational
calculus, Wiener constructed a general theory of smoothing and predicting
“time series,” — any problem (including economic and policy questions)
expressed as a discrete series of data. While he gestured at electric
power and servo design as well as communications, Wiener did not explicitly
address any previous work in feedback theory.
Yet Wiener's work, however theoretically important, did
not have immediate applications. In late 1942, Weaver reported that
for predicting actual recorded target tracks, Wiener’s “optimal” method
proved only marginally more effective than a far, far simpler design
of Henrik Bode's. At its next meeting, the NDRC decided to terminate
Wiener’s work; the project ended in January, 1943 (Bigelow left to join
a statistical fire control group at Columbia). [13]
B. Wiener's civilian elaboration
Disappointed by his failure to produce a practical device
for the war effort, Wiener plunged into elaborating on his work in a
context separate from the NDRC's concrete demands. Wiener had a long
time interest in physiology, and the previous spring he and collaborators
physician Arturo Rosenblueth and neurologist Walter Cannon had begun
addressing physiological and neurological feedback. In the spring of
1942 Wiener’s papers first mention the idea of the human operator as
a feedback element, an integral part of the system. He discussed the
“behaviorist” implications of his work in control, “the problem of examining
the behavior of an instrument from this [behaviorist] point of view
is fundamental in communication engineering.” [14] This period, the last few months of Wiener’s
NDRC program, marked the conception of his “cybernetic vision,” which
would make him famous after the war. Wiener placed his understanding
of the servomechanical nature of the mechanisms of control and communication
in both humans and machines at the core of cybernetics and his program
sought to extend that understanding to biological, physiological, and
social systems.
For Norbert Wiener, in the midst of the technological war,
cybernetics became a civilian enterprise. The cancellation of his NDRC
contracts in 1943 put him outside the massive wartime research effort,
with access to only civilian resources. His 1943 paper, “Behavior, Purpose,
and Teleology,” written with Rosenblueth and Bigelow, allied servomechanisms
with the “behavioristic approach” to organisms and classified behavior
by level of prediction. [15] The paper’s philosophical
tone and biological metaphors reflected the strictures of secrecy surrounding
Wiener’s prior work and his new alliance with the life sciences: topics
and researchers which, like Wiener, were comparatively free of the war
effort. Later Wiener acknowledged the role fire control and prediction
played in his thinking, but beginning with “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,”
cybernetics recast military control in a civilian mold.
Most indicative of this alienation and reconstruction is
Wiener’s consistent hesitation to acknowledge any of the multiple traditions
of feedback in engineering which preceded him. In all his writing on
cybernetics, he never cited Elmer Sperry, Nicholas Minorsky,
Harold Black, Harry Nyquist, Hendrik Bode, or Harold Hazen — all published
on the theory of feedback before 1940 (their publications became standard
citations); all were recognized as important to the field; all speculated
on the human role in automatic control; some even wrote on the merger
of communications and control and the epistemology of feedback. But
Wiener only rarely cited any servo theory later than Maxwell’s
1867 paper “On Governors.” [16] The omissions are striking,
Wiener must have been aware of the work: he was closely involved in
Vannevar Bush’s research program in the 1930s including Hazen's work
on servos; he worked with the MIT’s Servomechanisms Lab and its Radiation
Laboratory during the war, and was in touch with Hendrik Bode during
the wartime work on predictors. Still he wrote, “I think that I can
claim credit for transferring the whole theory of the servomechanism
bodily to communication engineering.” Wiener placed cybernetics at the
end of an intellectual, scientific trajectory, separate from the traditions
of technical practice from which it sprang. Wiener’s chapter on “Cybernetics
in history,” from The Human Use of Human Beings, refers only
to Leibniz, Pascal, Maxwell, and Gibbs as “ancestors,” of the new discipline.
Wiener reacted to and built on an evolving understanding,
pervasive among engineers and psychologists involved with fire control
in the 1940s, that the boundary between humans and machines affected
the performance of dynamic systems and was a fruitful area of research.
Unlike Wiener, however, NDRC researchers remained bound by military
secrecy at least until 1945 and busy with contractual obligations (many
remained so after the war. With no publication restrictions and no time
obligations to wartime research contracts, Wiener could do and say as
he pleased.
Wiener's reformulation had ideological implications, especially
in light of his own estrangement from military research. After Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, Wiener became critical of the American military's dominance
of the country's engineering efforts. In the early forties, he had been
anything but a pacifist: he suggested to the army filling antiaircraft
shells with flammable gasses to burn enemy planes from the sky; he pondered
what types of forested areas and grain crops were most susceptible to
fire bombing. [17] Still, the atomic bombs, and perhaps his
disappointing NDRC project, changed Wiener’s attitude toward military
research. His primary substantive contact with what he later called
“the tragic insolence of the military mind,” occurred under NDRC auspices
and ended in January, 1943. [18] Though the "Interpolation,
Extrapolation…" paper had significant military applications, Wiener's
Cybernetics sought primarily to elaborate it as civilian philosophy,
rather than military engineering.
Wiener's efforts to bring his model to broad communities
of physiologists, physicians, and social scientists, are well documented. [19] Through the informal "Teleological Society,"
the series of Macy Conferences, and a growing identity as a public intellectual,
Wiener elevated his thinking on control and communication to a moral
philosophy of technology, and enjoyed enthusiastic response. Of this
elevation, of the A.A. Predictor to the “symbol for the new age of man,”
Galison argues that Wiener enshrined an oppositional military metaphor
into the civilian science of cybernetics and its descendents. [20] In light of Wiener's wartime work, however, the survival of
the oppositional model was also ironic, as Wiener's wartime experience
suggests he formulated cybernetics also as a specifically non-military,
scientific endeavor.
Nor was Wiener's formulation the only to emerge from the
War with broad implications. In 1945, as the NDRC closed down, it issued
a series of Summary Technical Reports. The volume on fire control contained
a special essay, “Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems,”
by Richard B. Blackman, Hendrik Bode, and Claude Shannon, which formally
integrated communications and control and pointed toward generality
in signal processing. The authors treated fire control as “a special
case of the transmission, manipulation, and utilization of intelligence.”
They assessed control as a problem in electrical communications, developing
analogs to the prediction problem, “couched entirely in electrical language.”
The authors, like Wiener, recognized the broad applicability of their
study, “The input data...are thought of as constituting a series in
time similar to weather records, stock market prices, production statistics,
and the like.” Acknowledging the importance of Wiener’s work, Blackman,
Bode, and Shannon devoted significant effort to summarizing his statistical
approach. Ultimately they rejected it, however, due to problems applying
the RMS error criterion to fire control, as well as its assumptions
about statistical behavior of human pilots. Instead, the paper formulated
the problem as one of communications engineering, drawing heavily on
Bode’s work in feedback control: “there is an obvious analogy between
the problem of smoothing the data to eliminate or reduce the effect
of tracking errors and the problem of separating a signal from interfering
noise in communications systems.”
[21] While noting “this analogy...must of course not be carried
too far,” the paper considered inputs and disturbances in fire control
systems as signals in the frequency domain, just like those in telephone
communications.
At the same time that Wiener was working through his ideas
on cybernetics, of course, Claude Shannon developed his own theory of
communication, and the case forms something of a contrast to Wiener's
expansive moves. Shannon built on his own experiences in fire control,
computing, and cryptography as well as ideas from twenty years before
at Bell Labs. In his famous 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory
of Communication," Shannon provided provide a measure of channel
capacity, in bits per second, which describes the maximum amount of
information possible to send down a given channel. He added a serious
consideration of noise and a statistical approach to the problem. “Communication
theory is heavily indebted to Wiener for much of its basic philosophy
and theory,” Shannon wrote, citing Wiener’s NDRC report. [22] Shannon’s measure leads to a theory of efficient
coding, how to optimally translate a series of “primary symbols,” such
as English text, into “secondary code” to be transmitted.” [23] As if to solidify the connection between
Shannon’s theory and fire control, Warren Weaver wrote a popular introduction
and explication of information theory, published with Shannon’s paper
in a small book, in which Weaver called for an expanded context for
information theory in a hierarchy of human activity.
[24] Yet while others built on Shannon's work and applied it to
numerous other problems, including everything from biology to psychology
and art, Shannon himself did not make the expansive leaps that Wiener
did. In fact, Shannon mocked the "scientific bandwagon" which
had grown up around information theory, and warned that "the basic
results of the subject are aimed in a very specific direction, a direction
that is not necessarily relevant to such fields as psychology, economics,
and other social sciences." [25]
In light of the NDRC’s research program in fire control,
and, for that matter, of decades of pre-war control engineering, Wiener’s
syntheses of communications and control, human and machine, articulated
broad converging patterns as much as created new ones. Cybernetic ideas
had as much to do with established and evolving engineering traditions
as with any radically new military mindset. Cybernetics, the
book as well as the movement, articulated a vision of changing human/machine
analogies which resonated with a broad audience. Its ramifications in
the United States and abroad were significant, if as much for the overarching
vision as for any concrete results. Its very malleability, however,
of the human-machine analogy and its underlying mathematics, would both
undermine cybernetics and be a source of its power, especially as it
moved into international environments. Wiener's own postwar politics
would not be enough to stabilize the ideology of his formulation, for
others, as they took up cybernetics, had politics of their own.
III. Cybernetics and Information
Theory in France
How, then, was cybernetics received outside the United
States, as a military tool, an analytical technique, and a philosophical
program? While cybernetics is generally thought to have American origins,
the book itself was actually published in France. In that country, information
theory was hailed as a new general discipline which included cybernetics.
Through the first two congresses dealing with cybernetics, held in Paris
in 1950 and 1951, the French adopted and modified Wiener's work. Debates
became acrimonious as the French Communist Party strongly engaged itself
against cybernetics, which it saw as a ‘bourgeois’ science. From the
late 1950s onwards, a kind of normalization of the field took place,
which correlated both with the promotion of cybernetics in popular science
articles and books and with the institutionalization of cybernetics
research in Western Europe. This development also relied on the contributions
of a few scientists who took advantage of information theory to fill
the existing gap between physics, mathematics and engineering science.
In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress
on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France and organized by the bourbakist
mathematician, Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899-1983). During this stay in France
Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the unifying character
of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of
Brownian motion and in telecommunication engineering. The following
summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism
‘cybernetics’ (from the Greek – meaning the man at the wheel or rudder)
into his scientific theory. Though the word is found in the Gorgias
by Plato, it also had a French usage, though Wiener didn’t know that
the French physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) had already used
it for his classification of the sciences to define “how the citizens
can enjoy a peaceful time”.
[26]
Wiener’s book was published in English by Hermann Editions
in Paris and by M.I.T. Press, in collaboration with John Wiley &
Sons in New York. In an introductory chapter about this “explosive
science”, Pierre De Latil reminds us that M.I.T. Press tried their best
to prevent the publication of the book in France, since Wiener, then
professor at M.I.T., was bound to them by contract. As a representative
of Hermann Editions, M. Freymann managed to find a compromise and the
French publisher won the rights to the book. [27] This became financially significant
since after three reprints in six months, the book had sold 21,000 copies.
A journalist at Business Week compared it with the Kinsey Report,
also published in 1948, about the sexual behavior of American people,
“In one respect Wiener’s book resembles the Kinsey report ; the
publication reaction to it is at least as significant as the content
of the book itself.” [28]
The French press reacted enthusiastically. On December
28, 1948 in the well-known newspaper Le Monde, a whole page was
dedicated to “A new science: Cybernetics” with the subtitle “Towards
a governing machine…”. The author, Dominique Dubarle, sticks close to
the myth of the robot, predicting that man would be replaced by machine
even for the functions which require man’s intelligence. Far from the
technical questions linked to servomechanisms, this perspective was
clearly driven by a kind of techno-optimism. New kinds of machines are
mentioned: “prediction machines” (like air defense systems), “sensitive
machines” (so the blind people could ‘see’ again), and “sorting machines”.
It is noteworthy that Dubarle identifies the key common point of these
machines, the capacity to treat information, newly defined according
to the scientific context introduced by Wiener and especially developed
by Claude E. Shannon in his mathematical theory of communication. “Let’s
say that those machines are designed to collect and elaborate information
in order to produce results which can lead to decisions as well as to
knowledge”. This is how Dubarle ends his review, reflecting on “a unique
government for the planet” which could as a new “political Leviathan,”
“supply the present obvious inadequacy of the brain when the latter
is concerned with the customary machinery of politics.” This is in fact
the translation Wiener himself made for his book on The Human Use
of Human Beings which devotes six pages to Dubarle’s “penetrating
review”. [29]
This article in Le Monde was the impetus for a series
of articles in the main intellectual journals like Esprit and
La Nouvelle revue française. We again find Dubarle, in 1950,
defending an indeterminist conception of science, necessary for him
in order to introduce the scientific notion of information.
[30] This philosophical debate turned out to be crucial in 1953,
when the famous French physicist, Louis de Broglie, commenting on the
theories of quantum physics adopted this same position (see below).
During this lapse of two years, between 1948 and 1950, Louis de Broglie
had already been confronted with cybernetics. A “Circle of Cybernetical
Studies” (Cercle d'Etudes Cybernétiques) had been created and
de Broglie was the Honorary President of this first association with
the word 'cybernetics' in its name.
[31] Vallée, Scotto du Vettimo and Talbotier decided as early as
1949 to gather interested readers of Wiener's book. [32] Whereas many people read and
discussed Wiener's book, few scientists were in touch with Americans
involved in these fields. For instance, the physicist Leon Brillouin
(1889-1969), who had lived in New York since 1941, tried to organize
visits from French officials to take advantage of the latest developments
related to computers. [33] J. Pérès, director of the Institut Blaise
Pascal in Paris (created in 1946), went with L. Couffignal to the United
States, but Couffignal, then in charge of the construction of the first
French computer, preferred advocating a different ‘French’ conception
and decided to ignore the American accomplishments related to the construction
of the first computers. This turned out to be an important error and
the notorious French delay in computing finds an explanation in the
fact that so much credit had been accorded to Couffignal.
A. French Political Context
Still, the fact that Couffignal decided to ignore US research
has to be understood in the French context of this time. In 1947, France
was marked by political instability. In the November 1946 legislative
election, the French Communist Party came first, with nearly a third
of the votes, but in May 1947, the communist ministers were dismissed
by the President Ramadier who followed Truman’s appeal from March 15th
to all Western countries to exclude all communist forces from governments.
French people still had to live with rationing, and by the end of August
1947, the daily bread value per inhabitant went under the 200g level.
Strikes in October and November led to the resignation of the Ramadier
cabinet.
These strikes affected the reception of cybernetics in
France. At the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers (C.N.A.M.),
a series of five public lectures had been announced, dealing with servomechanisms.
In his introductory remarks, Albert Métral (1902-1962) advocated the
“French technology” which could in his view could easily compete with
the “science and techniques from abroad.” The participants were mostly
scientists who also worked with the military, especially from the engineering
sciences or telecommunication research. Trained in mechanics, Métral
praised the French “grey matter potential.” This kind of scientific
nationalism was indeed associated with a vague anti-Americanism, as
in some of the public declarations made at this time by Général de Gaulle.
[34] One of the lectures organized in Paris in the last week of
October 1947 had to be cancelled because of the strikes. [35] The general climate of opinion
at this time was somewhat hostile to American culture and science, and
this was only the beginning of the Cold War era. France was really “between
the East and the West,” which was made clear whenever the Marshall Plan
or the status of Germany were discussed.
[36]
This political context, then, set the stage for cybernetics,
viewed as an American theory, to be introduced in France. In 1950, the
French mathematician G.-Th. Guilbaud in his article entitled, “Cybernetical
Divagations,” criticized the use of a “fashionable name” and wondered
if, in the development of cybernetics, there were not some "improper
associations,” “fuzzy meaning” and constitution of “myths.” Nevertheless,
he recalled that cybernetics was born out of a desire for unification
and that, as such, it was worthy of consideration.
[37] This idea of unification provided the impetus for the first
scientific congresses on cybernetics.
B. Discussions at the first French congresses
The first two congresses dealing with cybernetics or information
theory gathered scientists from different backgrounds with different
goals. [38] Mathematicians, for instance, were not much
interested in the very general considerations contained in Cybernetics,
while some engineers, who in France were somewhat despised by the intellectual
elite, were intrigued by this book, in which they saw as a possibility
of gaining social recognition. Generally, these congresses allowed a
first timid institutionalization of cybernetics when new research areas
were being recognized.
Instead of a congress, between April and May 1950 Louis
de Broglie organized a series of lectures. The general title was “Cybernetics”,
with the subtitle “signal and information theory.” [39] Dennis Gabor was the only scientist from abroad who insisted,
like Louis de Broglie, on bringing cybernetics into the physical sciences
to avoid it becoming a part of mathematics. Studies on Brownian motion,
for instance, were considered helpful for telecommunication engineers.
Engineers involved in this field generally accepted this suggestion,
and Julien Loeb, from the National Center for the Study of Telecommunications
(C.N.E.T.), who also had presented a paper at the C.N.A.M. in 1947,
recalled that “If sciences like biology, sociology etc. should benefit
from the theoretical works exposed in these series of lectures, the
telecommunication techniques themselves should also profit.”
[40]
It was only after these lectures that information theory
was progressively recognized as an autonomous scientific discipline.
A. Blanc-Lapierre, a trained physicist who decided to work on noise
effects, remembers that prior to this lecture series, his colleagues
found his work too impregnated with mathematics and that in the mathematics
community, he was criticized for not having thoroughly studied probability
theory. [41]
Cybernetics appeared again one year later in a congress
titled “computing machines and human thought” held in Paris in January
1951. This congress was aimed at a larger public; as we can read in
a report written by Paul Chauchard, it was “the first manifestation
in France of the young cybernetics, with the participation of N. Wiener,
the father of this science.” [42] The anti-Americanism expressed at the end
of the 1940s had almost vanished. The Marshall Plan had been accepted,
two countries had been created in Germany and France was now clearly
on the Western side. [43] For this congress, sponsored
by the Rockefeller Foundation, a number of foreigners were invited,
including Howard Aiken, Warren McCulloch, Maurice Wilkes, Grey Walter,
Donald MacKay and Ross Ashby, along with Wiener who was staying in Paris
for a couple of months at the Collège de France. It is no surprise that
the two French scientists who organized the conference were the two
who had visited the U.S. laboratories, Couffignal and Pérès.
Three hundred people attended the congress where fourteen
machines from six different countries were demonstrated, including a
mechanical chess player by Torres y Quevedo and the famous ‘Turtle’
conceived by Grey Walter, two machines specially designed to imitate
human behavior. Studying the 38 presented papers and the script of the
reported discussions, one can make two points. First, whereas in France
the mathematicians seemed to dominate research related to computing
machines, one finds physicists in the same position in the U.K. Secondly,
information theory already played an important role in the development
of the analogy between the human brain and computing machines. McCulloch
for instance suggested that the nervous system makes use of “logarithmic
processes”, which are also utilized by telecommunications engineers.
So, at the end of these two conferences, already a kind of “French cybernetics”
which had been admitted in the scientific establishment. In 1952, a
first assessment of American cybernetics was made by Louis de Broglie,
who also attended this congress. He estimated that overall, cybernetics
had not been as innovative as it could have been and that in fact, servomechanism
theory had already been established as an independent discipline without
it. [44] This was the time when cybernetics became
the focal point of an important ideological debate.
C. Ideological attack from the French
Communist Party
Since the outbreak of the Cold War, philosophy of science had developed
into a major ideological battlefield, and cybernetics quickly became the
subject of several lively discussions. Already in May 1948, before the
publication of Cybernetics, Jacques Bergier had written an article
on “an ongoing new revolution even more important than that of the atomic
age”, the general theory of automata. His position was ambiguous: on the
one hand he expressed his enthusiasm, and on the other, he feared that
“robots will take the place of workers.”
[45] He referred mostly to Soviet science, and, as in the American
case, his two reference fields which led to a general theory were automatic
exchange systems and anti-aircraft technology.
One year
later, in the same weekly, Jean Cabrerets attacked cybernetics. [46] Referring to the project of
a French computing machine that Couffignal had begun to conceive, Cabrerets
proudly announced that “the universal French machines have chosen intelligence”
and will soon “eclipse those [American] electronic brains like the Eniac.”
His comments on the visit that Brillouin organized for Couffignal were
typical of the period, “It is to us significant that these new ‘electronic
brains’ were born after and not before the visit that Brillouin and
Couffignal made last year to the universities of Harvard and Philadelphia.”
To understand these vehement attacks against American science,
one has to consider the action of the Kominform, created in September
1947, and the evolution of the Soviet positions (see the section on
Soviet cybernetics below). The anti-cybernetics campaign in France culminated
with an article by André Lentin, in the official monthly journal of
the communist party, La Pensée (The Thought). Lentin writes on
“Cybernetics: real problems and mystifications”.
[47]
In an interview, Lentin remembers that he was annoyed at
the beginning of the 1950s because “bad scientists” used cybernetics’
popularity to publish and Wiener’s book was used in almost all disciplines
as a kind of panacea. [48] In his article, he directed
the reader to the proceedings of the 1947 conferences held at the C.N.A.M.
to understand a real general theory of servomechanisms. He tried to
show that what Wiener did was more or less merely commentary on J. Watt’s
work on the governor. Cybernetics was simply described as a “gigantic
enterprise of mystification.” The only interest Lentin saw in Wiener’s
theory was the description of negative feedback which showed for him
a “clear and conscious expression of the dialectic laws.” Apart from
this point, he believes that cybernetics should be rejected because
it is a legitimatization of three dangerous bourgeois ideologies: Taylorism,
robots without class consciousness instead of workers; idealism, interpreting
a formal analogy between information and entropy as an identity; and,
above all, capitalist economy, if one thinks of such feedback laws as
“offer and demand determine the market.” [49]
D. French contributions to information theory
Apart from these ideological critics, the mid 1950s were
also marked by French contributions to the development of information
theory. Brillouin, central figure for the exchanges he organized between
France and the United States, was also one of the first promoters of
information theory in physics. His first publication on this theme,
which emphasized the analogy between entropy and information as defined
by Shannon in order to explain paradox like that of the Maxwell’s Demon,
dates from 1949. [50] A few years later he managed to rewrite most of the chapters
of physics using information theory. The corresponding book became worldwide
known as a milestone in the development of information theory. [51] With his involvement in information
theory, Brillouin managed to fill the gap between his interests for
engineering science (he contributed for instance during the war to the
development of magnetron) and his general conceptions of physics.
In mathematics, two names are particularly significant
and information theory is again at the crossing between different interests.
Benoît Mandelbrot (born in 1924), who proofread with Walter Pitts the
manuscript written by Wiener for Cybernetics, made for his Ph.D.
in mathematics a clear connection between game theory and information
theory. [52] He showed for instance that both thermodynamics
and statistical structures of language can be explained as results of
minimax games between ‘nature’ and ‘emitter’. He also made the connection
between the definitions of information given by the British statistician
Ronald A. Fisher in the 1920s, by the physicist Dennis Gabor in 1946
(he was born in 1900 in Budapest but exiled in Great-Britain since 1934)
and the already well-known definition proposed by Shannon.
Beyond a mathematical generalization of all these definitions,
one finds also an important development of the unifying character of
information theory. This is a noteworthy aspect of another Ph.D. written
by Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1920-1996) and also published in 1953. [53] As early as 1951, preparing this work, Schützenberger
had showed that a generalized information theory could be used as well
for the analysis of electrical circuits as for the determination of
liminal sensibility values in drug design or for botanic taxonomy. [54]
These French contributions to information theory quickly
found recognition in the United States more than in their own country.
From 1952 to 1954 Mandelbrot was for instance at M.I.T. and then at
the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton and it is emblematic
that when a new journal is founded on information theory, Information
and Control, in 1958, Brillouin is one the three editors (with the
British Colin Cherry and the American Peter Elias) and among the scientists
of editorial board, one finds L. Couffignal and B. Mandelbrot,
next to Shannon and Wiener. [55]
E. A French consensus regarding the place
of cybernetics
After Stalin’s death in May 1953, the general strike that
took place in France in August and the election of René Coty in December,
a period of normalization set in. This was profoundly marked for the
cybernetics field by the popularization of Wiener’s theory with a European
reappropriation and the beginning, even in the 1950s of the institutionalization
of cybernetics research.
A few journalists decided to write books recasting the
work of Wiener and all the American scientists who had participated
in the birth of cybernetics in a wider (French!) tradition beginning
with Ampère and including for instance, the work of Lafitte presented
in his Thoughts on the Science of Machines, published in 1932.
[56] The main books assuring a large audience for cybernetics were
written by the journalists Pierre de Latil, Albert Ducrocq in France
and also by the mathematician Vitold Belevitch in Belgium. [57] With this new rebuilt history
of cybernetics, the aim was to present an alternative to the Anglo-Saxon
empiricism which gave significant importance to simulations. For the
French, a few realizations are indeed shown as example, but the “as
if” doesn’t become an “is” like in the American case. Presenting the
latest work on machine languages, Belevitch showed the underestimated
difficulties related to the understanding of language. General enthusiasm
had given place to moderate assessment.
At the same time, the institutionalization of cybernetics
took place along a French-Belgian axis.
[58] The International Association for cybernetics was created
in Namur and it is in this Belgian city that international conferences
are regularly held, the first one in 1956 and the most recent in 1998.
In France, Cybernetics helped to reshape the boundaries between mathematics,
physics and engineering, making them more permeable. After identifying
ideological load of cybernetics and using it in the debates of the national
context, cybernetics was regarded as a pool of new ideas to promote
interdisciplinarity.
The Second International Congress on Cybernetics in Namur
in September 1958 was attended by a small “reconnaissance mission” (three
delegates) from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Upon their return, the
delegates complained in their report that “the small size of the Academy
of Sciences delegation does not correspond to the scale of our country
and to the tasks put before Soviet science in the field of cybernetics.” [59] In subsequent years, however, Soviet delegations remained
small and low-profile. In 1960 Communist Party bureaucrats rejected
a proposal for the Soviet Academy Council on Cybernetics to join the
International Association for Cybernetics.
[60] As in the French case, the history of Soviet cybernetics was
marred by a controversy.
IV. Cybernetics and Information Theory in the
Soviet Union
The evolution of Soviet attitudes toward cybernetics and
information theory in many ways paralleled the French story, but with
stronger accents: the initial Soviet rejection of cybernetics was more
decisive, while the later embrace of this field proved more wide-spread
and profound. In 1954, the Short Philosophical Dictionary—a standard
ideological reference—defined cybernetics as a “reactionary pseudo-science,”
“an ideological weapon of imperialist reaction.”
[61] By the mid-1950s, cybernetics was portrayed as an innocent
victim of political oppression and “rehabilitated,” along with political
prisoners of the Stalinist regime. In the early 1960s, cybernetics was
canonized in a new Party Program and hailed as a “science of communism.”
Soviet intellectuals of the Khrushchev era put cybernetics forward as
a project for radical reform, challenging the Stalinist legacy in science
and society. By the early 1970s, however, former cybernetics enthusiasts
were left disillusioned, while cybernetic discourse was appropriated
by the political establishment and cybernetics turned into a tool for
maintaining the existing order rather than changing it.
[62]
A. The Anti-Cybernetics Campaign in the
USSR
The early 1950s—the time when cybernetics and information
theory became known to the Soviet reader—was the wrong time to propagate
in the Soviet Union ideas originated in the West. That applied not only
to political doctrines, but to scientific theories and engineering approaches
as well. In the Cold War wave of anti-American propaganda in the early
1950s, nearly a dozen sharply critical articles appeared in Soviet academic
journals and popular periodicals, attacking cybernetics and information
theory as products of American imperialist ideology and totally ignoring
Russian traditions in these fields.
[63]
Soviet critics charged that Shannon’s theory of communication
reduced the human being to a “talking machine” [64] and equated human speech with “just a ‘flow’ of purely conditional,
symbolic ‘information,’ which does not differ in principle from digital
data fed into a calculating machine.” [65] Wiener’s formula, “information is information, not matter
or energy,” provoked a philosophical critique of the concept of information
as a non-material entity.
[66] Repeating Lenin’s criticism of some philosophical interpretations
of relativity physics in the early twentieth century, Soviet authors
castigated cyberneticians for replacing material processes with “pure”
mathematical formulae and equations, in which “matter itself disappears.”
[67] Cybernetics was labeled a “pseudo-science produced by science
reactionaries and philosophizing ignoramuses, prisoners of idealism
and metaphysics.” [68]
The anti-cybernetics campaign turned into a relentless
war on words like “information” and “entropy,” which crossed the boundaries
between the animate and the inanimate. In his Cybernetics, Wiener
attempted to bring together Shannon’s concept of entropy as a measure
of uncertainty in communication and Erwin Schrödinger’s concept of negative
entropy as a source of order in living organisms. Wiener identified
information with negative entropy and aspired to create a common language
for describing living organisms, self-regulating machines (e.g., servomechanisms
and computers), and human society. The critics argued that such crossing
of disciplinary boundaries was illegitimate and accused cyberneticians
of philosophical, ideological, and eventually political errors. As in
the French case, the Soviet critique of cybernetics served a particular
political agenda; it was inspired if not directly commissioned by the
Communist Party and became part of a general wave of anti-American propaganda
in the context of the Cold War. [69]
Schrödinger’s analysis of life within the framework of
the chromosome theory became a prominent target in Trofim Lysenko’s
crusade against genetics. Lysenko, backed by high-ranking Soviet officials,
attempted to discredit the use of physical methods and conceptual apparatus
in biology. [70] In his 1940 dispute with the leading Soviet
specialist on probability theory Andrei Kolmogorov Lysenko argued that
“biological regularities do not resemble mathematical laws” and equated
the use of statistics in support of genetics with the submission to
“blind chance.” [71] Trying to protect their political
and institutional domination in Soviet biology, the Lysenkoites erected
a philosophical Chinese wall between biology, on the one side, and physics
and mathematics, on the other. This posed serious obstacles before information
theory and cybernetics, which attempted to breach that wall.
Seeking to avoid political complications, Soviet mathematicians
and engineers working in the field of control and communications kept
their studies strictly technical and eschewed man-machine analogies.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s Kolmogorov developed a prediction
theory of stationary processes similar to Wiener’s, but did not make
any attempt to extend its applications to the life sciences or social
sciences. [72] Kolmogorov
was also among the first mathematicians to appreciate the significance
of Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication.”
[73] Kolmogorov and his students developed a rigorous mathematical
foundation of information theory, providing precise definitions and
meticulous proofs of major theorems. The 1953 Russian translation of
Shannon’s work, unfortunately, transformed the original nearly beyond
recognition; working under Soviet ideological censorship and self-censorship,
a cautious editor removed not only ideologically suspicious passages,
but also Appendix 7, which seemed too abstract for a technical paper.
As Kolmogorov later discovered with great disappointment, some of his
important theoretical results had already been published by Shannon
in the cut-out fragments. [74]
B. The Rehabilitation of Cybernetics and the
New Era
In March 1953, with the death of Stalin, the Soviet Union
entered a new era. The political “thaw” brought significant changes
to all spheres of Soviet life, including science and technology. The
period of forced isolation of Soviet science and technology from its
Western counterpart came to an end. The division into “socialist” and
“capitalist” science no longer held; claims were made for the universality
of science across political borders. The Soviet leadership embarked
on a course of rapid assimilation of modern Western scientific and technological
advances. In March 1955, a special governmental committee prepared a
classified report, “On the State of Radioelectronics in the USSR and
Abroad and Measures Necessary for Its Further Development in the USSR.”
This report emphasized the Soviet lag in communications engineering,
control engineering, and computing and blamed it on the anti-cybernetics
campaign: “As a result of irresponsible allegations by incompetent journalists,
the word “cybernetics” became odious and cybernetic literature was banned,
even for specialists, and this has undoubtedly damaged the development
of information theory, electronic calculating machines, and systems
of automatic control.” [75] In October 1955, the Academy of Sciences,
the State Committee on New Technology, and the Ministry of Higher Education
submitted to the Party Central Committee a top-secret report, “The Most
Important Tasks in the Development of Science in the Sixth Five-Year
Plan,” which, in particular, called for a significant expansion of studies
in the theory of probabilities, including information theory. “It is
imperative,” the report stressed, “to achieve a radical improvement
in the application of probability theory and mathematical statistics
to various problems of biology, technology, and economics. The void
existing here must be filled.” [76]
As a sign of recognition of the importance of information
theory for the national defense, the Soviet authorities became concerned
with potential leaks of Soviet results in this field to the West. In
August 1955, when Kolmogorov was invited to Stockholm to give a series
of lectures on the theory of probabilities, the Party Central Committee
allowed him to go only under the condition that he would not lecture
on information theory. The head of the Science Department of the Central
Committee argued that “certain aspects of information theory, if developed
further, may become very important for secret work.”
[77] Ironically, as soon as ideological obstacles to the development
of information theory were removed, the policy of military secrecy imposed
new, even more severe restrictions on this field.
In August 1955, in a drastic reversal of the earlier philosophical
critique, the journal Problems of Philosophy published the first
Soviet article speaking positively about cybernetics and non-technical
applications of information theory, authored by three specialists in
military computing—Aleksei Liapunov, a noted mathematician and the creator
of the first Soviet programming language; Anatolii Kitov, an organizer
of the first military computing centers; and Sergei Sobolev, the deputy
head of the Soviet nuclear weapons program in charge of the mathematical
support. They presented cybernetics as a general “doctrine of information,”
of which Shannon’s theory of communication was but one part. “Cybernetics,”
they wrote, “combines common elements from diverse fields of science:
the theory of communication, the theory of filters and anticipation,
the theory of tracking systems, the theory of automatic regulation with
feedback, the theory of electronic calculating machines, physiology,
and so on. Cybernetics treats various subjects of these sciences from
a single point of view—as systems that are processing and transmitting
information.” [78] The three authors interpreted
the notion of information very broadly, defining it as “all sorts of
external data, which can be received and transmitted by a system, as
well as the data that can be produced within the system.”
[79] Under the rubric of “information” fell any environmental influence
on living organisms, any knowledge acquired by man in the process of
learning, any signals received by a control device via feedback, and
any data processed by a computer.
Treating information theory as an “exact science,” Soviet
specialists saw its mission in bringing rigor into disciplines deeply
corrupted by ideological and political pressures. Kolmogorov insisted
that now, with the advent of cybernetics and information theory, “it
is impossible to use vague phrases and present them as being ‘laws,’
something that unfortunately people working in the humanities tend to
do.” [80] “The laws
of existence and transformation of information are objective and accessible
for study,” wrote the electrical engineer Igor’ Poletaev, the author
of Signal, the first Soviet book on cybernetics. “The determination
of these laws, their precise description, and the use of information-processing
algorithms, especially control algorithms, together constitute the content
of cybernetics.” [81] Soviet cybernetics transcended the domain of engineering and
fashioned itself as a science, a systematic study of the laws
of nature. The “nature” that cybernetics studied, however, was of a
special kind: it was an “objective” world constituted by information
exchanges and control processes.
Liapunov and his colleagues soon put forward an ambitious
project for the comprehensive “cybernetization” of Soviet science. Lecturing
in diverse scientific, engineering, and public audiences, Liapunov carried
with him a huge human-size table, whose rows represented twelve methods
of cybernetic analysis (determining information exchanges, deciphering
information code, determining the functions and elements of the control
system, etc.) each of which was applied to eight fields of study (economics,
computer programming, hardware design, production control, linguistics,
genetics, evolutionary biology, and physiology), represented by columns. [82] Biologists and linguists, physiologists and economists, computer
programmers and engineers—all found a place for themselves in this grand
design. In 1956-57, Liapunov and his associates delivered over one hundred
lectures on cybernetics in various academic institutions. Soviet cybernetics
spread over a wide range of disciplines and became a large-scale social
movement among Soviet scientists and engineers.
In April 1959, the Academy of Sciences created the Council
on Cybernetics to coordinate all Soviet cybernetic research, including
mathematical and engineering aspects of information theory. The Academy
also established the Laboratory for the Systems of Information Transmission,
later transformed into the Institute for the Problems of Information
Transmission, which became the leading Soviet research center in communications
engineering. [83] Institutionally and conceptually,
Soviet communications engineering was brought under the roof of cybernetics;
the Laboratory director Aleksandr Kharkevich became deputy chairman
of the Cybernetics Council.
C. Soviet Cybernetics as a Trading Zone
Soviet cybernetics served as a “trading zone,” in which
information theory concepts could transcend the boundaries of communications
engineering and spread into the life sciences and the social sciences. [84] Bringing genetics under the cybernetic umbrella,
in particular, served an important purpose: to protect Soviet geneticists
from Lysenkoites’ attacks. “A ‘unit of hereditary information’ sounded
less anti-Lysenkoist than a ‘gene,’” recalled geneticist Raisa Berg. [85] Soviet genetics found an institutional niche
among the communication sciences, the domain of mathematicians and engineers,
where the Lysenkoites could not reach. Mathematicians Liapunov and Sobolev
declared: “A living organism develops out of certain embryonic cells
in which somewhere lies information received from the parental organisms.
This is not physics; this is not physiology; this is the science of
the transmission of information.”
[86] They argued that since Lysenko could not prove the flow of
hereditary information from an organism as a whole to its embryonic
cells, his claim of the inheritance of acquired traits must be false.
On the other hand, they asserted the validity of classical genetics
on the basis of its “full agreement with the ideas advanced in cybernetics.” [87] The prominent evolutionary
biologist Ivan Shmal’gausen, one of the main targets of Lysenko’s 1948
speech, defended his theory of stabilizing selection by “translating
Darwin’s theory into the language of cybernetics.”
[88] The Council on Cybernetics provided support for persecuted
biologists; the series Problems of Cybernetics, edited by Liapunov,
regularly published articles on genetics, which could not appear in
the biological journals, controlled by the Lysenkoites.
In the field of linguistics, a crucial mediating role was
played by the prominent Russian émigré linguist Roman Jakobson, who
since 1949 taught at Harvard University. Jakobson was fascinated by
Shannon’s work and applied Shannon’s method of calculating the entropy
of printed English in his analysis of spoken Russian.
[89] Jakobson saw a deep similarity between Shannon’s choice of
binary digits (bits) as minimal units of information and his own earlier
idea of using binary oppositions as the structural basis for organizing
phonemic distinctive features into a phonological system. In Jakobson’s
view, Shannon’s theory helped generalize Jakobson’s insight about the
underlying binary structure of spoken language to human communication
in general. [90] In
1957, Jakobson became an Institute Professor at MIT, where he helped
establish the Center for Communications Sciences; in 1958 he joined
the editorial board of the journal Information and Control. Starting
from the mid-1950s, Jakobson regularly visited the Soviet Union and
actively propagated the innovations brought into linguistics by information
theory.
D. Models of Communication as Exchange
of Information
The model of human communication as information exchange
became very popular among young linguists who challenged traditional
Soviet linguistics, which relied on intuitive concepts and ideological
declarations. Ironically, they elaborated a new concept of meaning based
on Shannon’s notion of information, even though Shannon himself had
intentionally excluded any consideration of meaning from his communication
theory. Linguists Igor’ Mel’chuk and Alexander Zholkovsky developed
a formal model of natural language, in which they turned Shannon’s definition
of information as “that which is invariant under all reversible encoding
or translating operations” [91] into a definition of meaning as “what is
common in all texts that are intuitively perceived as equivalent to
the original text.” [92]
In a Soviet context, Shannon’s model of communication crossed the
boundaries between engineering and science to serve as a basis for an
alternative to the dominant linguistic discourse.
Searching for rigorous laws in linguistics, Kolmogorov
and his students conducted a series of experiments on measuring the
entropy of printed texts, using a modified version of Shannon’s letter-guessing
method. [93] Kolmogorov was particularly pleased to remark
(in private) that from the viewpoint of information theory (Soviet)
newspapers were less informative than poetry since political discourse
employed a large number of stock phrases and was highly predictable
in its content. [94] On the other hand, brilliant
poetry, despite the strict limitations imposed by the poetic form, carried
more information, for original poetic expressions were much more difficult
to guess.
Kolmogorov’s poetic studies had a surprising outcome, leading
to the elaboration of an original mathematical theory of complexity
related to the concepts of information and entropy. While Shannon interpreted
entropy as a measure of uncertainty, and Wiener as a measure of disorder,
Kolmogorov viewed it as a measure of complexity. Kolmogorov put forward
an algorithmic approach to the definition of information as an alternative
to Shannon’s probabilistic approach. In his view, the main problem with
the probabilistic approach was that it precluded the possibility of
calculating the amount of information in the case of a unique message,
e.g., Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. “Is it possible to include
this novel in a reasonable way into the set of ‘all possible novels,’”
Kolmogorov asked sarcastically, “and further to postulate the existence
of a certain probability distribution in this set?” [95] He proposed to measure the
amount of information in an individual object with relation to another
individual object, based on the notion of “relative complexity,” or
entropy, of those objects. He defined the relative complexity of an
object (depending on the “method of programming”) as the minimal length
of a “program” that can produce that object. [96] “If some object has a ‘simple’
structure,” he explained, “then for its description it suffices to have
a small amount of information; but if it is ‘complex,’ then its description
must contain a lot of information.”
[97] Kolmogorov argued that, within his algorithmic approach, the
complexity of the novel War and Peace could be “uniquely determined,”
given certain a priori information about the language, style,
and content of the text.
[98] His reformulation of both information theory and probability
theory in term of complexity was perceived in the mathematics community
as “almost a cultural revolution, turning both subjects inside out,
and reversing the order in which they are normally considered.” [99]
Paradoxically, cybernetics, which was supposed to bring
formal rigor and exact reasoning to all disciplines, was itself conspicuously
lacking a formal definition. Soviet cyberneticians often had very different
notions about the content and boundaries of cybernetics. In his 1958
article in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Kolmogorov defined
cybernetics as a discipline studying “the methods of receiving, storing,
processing, and using information in machines, living organisms, and
their associations.” [100] In the same volume, Kolmogorov
also published an entry on information, which he introduced as the “main
concept of cybernetics.” [101] Mathematician Andrei Markov,
Jr., ridiculed Kolmogorov’s definitions, arguing that they produced
a vicious circle. Kolmogorov responded by defining information as an
“operator which changes the distribution of probabilities in a given
set of events.” Markov dismissed that definition too, mockingly describing
how “a given computer would receive a given operator, which changes
the distribution of its probabilities, and store this operator on its
magnetic drum.” [102]
In cybernetic discourse, the word “information” had two very different
meanings: in information theory, the “amount of information” characterized
the uncertainty removed by the “information source”; in computing, on
the other hand, the term “information” stood informally for any kind
of data processed by a computer. The mechanical unification of information
theory and computing in the Soviet Union under the rubric of cybernetics
mixed the two uses of the term “information” together and produced the
confusion pointed out by Markov. The insurmountable difficulty of forging
a common language for all members of the diverse cybernetic community
to a large extent undermined the entire project for the “cybernetization”
of science. Soviet cybernetics, which at first had emerged as an alternative
to official philosophy and a movement for radical reform, eventually
lost its rebellious spirit and turned into a pliable philosophical doctrine
of the “dialectical rotation of information and noise.”
[103]
V. Conclusion
The main difference between Soviet cybernetics and its
American and French counterparts is not to be found in the range of
cybernetic applications or the types of mathematical models used. In
this sense, there was a great similarity across the borders, due to
the systematic Soviet efforts to appropriate the latest American and
Western European techniques and technologies. The main difference lies
in the political and cultural meanings attached to cybernetic ideas.
The history of cybernetics and information theory is one
of crossing cultural, political, and disciplinary boundaries. Wiener
abstracted a general scientific theory out of technical culture, and
his theory was broadly interpreted by American political scientists,
anthropologists, economists, and social scientists. Through Wiener's
supple hands, what started out as an applied method of military computing
transformed into a vision of the new bio-machine age. In the West, cybernetics
contributed to the already strong contemporary traditions of mathematical
reasoning in biology, physiology, linguistics, and economics by expanding
the arsenal of mathematical and engineering tools used in those disciplines
for modeling and implementation of control and communication mechanisms.
In the United States, Wiener's formulation of cybernetics as civilian
science of technology and society helped to legitimize ideas originally
developed and continually applied to warlike purposes. Ironically, that
vision's military roots, and many of its Cold War military applications,
were at odds with Wiener’s personal pacifist stand.
Crossing international borders placed cybernetics and information
theory in completely different cultural contexts, in which the question
of national origins of scientific ideas suddenly acquired great political
significance. The Soviet ideological campaigns against Western influences
condemned of information theory and cybernetics as reactionary and idealistic.
The Soviet position had great impact on French Communists and the subsequent
controversy over the these theories in France. In both France and the
Soviet Union, cybernetics and information theory could be adopted only
after their “domestication,” i.e. adaptation to the specific cultural
situations in the two countries.
In France, reactions of many scientists towards cybernetics
were, from the beginning, marked by a kind of diffuse nationalism. The
French attempted to appropriate cybernetics as their own by claiming
Ampère’s priority. Even if Wiener's work had to be mentioned, it was
only to add immediately that the book was published in Paris and that
Ampère had used the word 'cybernétique' as early as the 19th century.
The communist party supported this campaign until it reversed its position
following changes coming from Moscow. From the mid 1950s onwards, cybernetics
was used to promote interdisciplinary fields in which some engineers
found public recognition.
Once cybernetics was sufficiently reinterpreted, France
and the Soviet Union also deployed its ideas differently. In France,
from the mid 1950s onwards, cybernetics was used to promote interdisciplinary
fields in which engineers as a group found public recognition. Soviet
cybernetics, on the other hand, emerged during the post-Stalin era as
a cross-disciplinary project and a social movement with a distinct political
mission—to reform Soviet science, both politically and intellectually—after
the years of Stalinism. Western scientists viewed cybernetics as a useful
method for solving a wide range of theoretical and practical problems.
For Soviet scientists, cybernetics served a higher goal—breaking administrative
and disciplinary barriers and liberating Soviet science from ideological
and political pressures; they spoke the cybernetic language as a language
of objectivity and truth.
Different national versions of cybernetics and information
theory did not differ much in the range of cybernetic applications or
the types of mathematical models used, considering the active exchange
of latest techniques and technologies among the industrialized countries.
The main difference lay in the political and cultural meanings attached
to cybernetic ideas. Crossing boundaries often provoked attempts to
separate the content of information theory and cybernetics from their
initial ideological assumptions. Each time a significant cultural/political/disciplinary
boundary is crossed, old ideological connotations are questioned and
new ones attached. Trying to avoid political complications, Soviet scientists
in the early 1950s tried hard to present the two new sciences as politically
neutral, value-free technical tools for solving problems. Having failed
to de-ideologize cybernetics and information theory, however, they instead
re-ideologized these two sciences—but with different ideology. A cross-cultural
analysis illuminates both the ideological malleability of cybernetics
and information theory and the role of cultural context in shaping the
fate of these ideas |
[1] See Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory
of Communication (Urbana, Ill.: The University of Illinois Press,
1949), pp. 29-125, translated as Klod Shennon [Claude Shannon], “Statisticheskaia
teoriia peredachi elektricheskikh signalov,” in Nikolai A. Zheleznov,
ed., Teoriia peredachi elektricheskikh signalov pri nalichii pomekh,
trans. from English (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoi literatury,
1953).
[2] Nikolai A. Zheleznov, “Predislovie,” in Idem, ed., Teoriia peredachi
elektricheskikh signalov, p. 5.
[4] Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1956), 265. Also see Cybernetics: or Control
and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1948), 8 for a similar account and a similar claim.
[5] Steve Joshua Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics
to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980).
Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the
Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn, 1994), 228-66.
Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse
in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). Lily Kay, "Cybernetics,
Information, Life: The Emergence of Scriptural Representations of
Heredity," Configurations 5 (1997): 23-91.
[6] David A. Mindell, “Beasts and Systems: Taming and Stability in the
History of Control,” in Miriam Levin, ed., Cultures of Control
in the Machine Age, Harwood Academic Publishers, forthcoming.
[7] David A. Mindell, "'Datum for its Own Annihilation': Feedback,
Control, and Computing, 1916-1945," Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1996.
[8] Several published accounts narrate of Wiener’s work in prediction.
Wiener, I Am a Mathematician, 242-56. Stuart Bennett, A
History of Control Engineering, 1930-1960 (London: The Institution
of Electrical Engineers, 1993), 170-79. Idem., “Norbert Wiener
and Control of Anti-Aircraft Guns,” IEEE Control Systems (December,
1994), 58-62. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener
and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn, 1994)228-66.
P. Masani and R.S. Phillips, “Antiaircraft Fire Control and the Emergence
of Cybernetics,” in Norbert Wiener: Collected Works with Commentaries,
ed. Masani, (Cambridge: 1985), Volume 4:141-79.
[9] Norbert Wiener, Final Report on Section D2, Project #6, December 1,
1942, quoted in Masani and R. Phillips, “Antiaircraft Fire Control
and the Emergence of Cybernetics,” 152.
[10] See Bennett, A History of Control Engineering, 174, and “Norbert
Wiener and Control of Anti-Aircraft Guns,” for a technical explanation
of this approach. See also Thomas Kailath, “Norbert Wiener and the
Development of Mathematical Engineering,” (unpublished manuscript,
Stanford University, 1996).
[11] “Summary of Project #6: Section D-2, NDRC,” October 1, 1941. OSRD
E-151 Applied Mathematics Panel General Records, Box 24.
[12] Norbert Wiener, The Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing
of Stationary Time Series (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1949), 3. This
is the published version of Wiener’s original “Yellow Peril,” report
(so named because of its yellow cover and difficult mathematics) “Extrapolation,
Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering
Applications,” NDRC Report to the Services 370, February 1, 1942.
[13] Division 7 Meeting Minutes, January 7-8, 1943 and February 3, 1943.
OSRD7 GP Box 72 Division 7 Meetings folder. See also Galison, “The
Ontology of the Enemy,” 244-5 and Bigelow interview, 8. NW to WW,
January 15, 1943 and January 28, 1943 are Wiener’s last words on the
project to the NDRC. Wiener recognized his predictor barely exceeded
the performance of competing smoothers, but he believed there was
too little data (only two courses for comparison) and that further
work should continue to compare ten or a hundred courses.
[14] See, for example, Wiener to Haldane, June 22, 1942. Wiener Papers,
Box 2 Folder 64. This letter is marked “NOT SENT.” That May, Rosenblueth
mentioned his conversations with Wiener and Bigelow in a presentation
at a meeting on the physiology of the conditioned reflex, sponsored
by the Macy Foundation. See Steve J. Heims, Constructing a Social
Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group: 1946-1953
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) 14-15.
[15] Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior,
Purpose, and Teleology,” Philos. Sci. 10 (1943) 18-24, reprinted
in Masani ed., Collected Works volume 4: 180-86.
[16] In one of Wiener's rare references to servo theory, on page 7, Cybernetics
cites Leroy A. MacColl, Fundamental Theory of Servomechanisms
(New York: Van Nostrand, 1946). This book synthesizes the Bell Labs
approach to servos as developed for the electrical gun director computer,
T-10. While Wiener cited Maxwell's paper as fundamental, Otto Mayr
has persuasively argued that it was incoherent in terminology and
definition and lacked the idea of a closed feedback loop so central
to later conceptions of control. Otto Mayr, “Maxwell and the Origins
of Cybernetics” in Philosophers and Machines (New York: Science
History Publications, 1976), 168-88.
[17] Lt. Col. C. Thomas Sthole to NW, July 23, 1943. Wiener Papers, Box
1 Folder 57. NW to Bush, September 21, 1940. Box 2, Folder 58, Wiener
Papers.
[18] Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist Rebels,” Atlantic Monthly January,
1947, reprinted in Masani ed., Collected Works vol. 4 748.
Note that in Masani, Norbert Wiener, the bibliography of Wiener’s
military work (p. 391) lists no contributions after January 15, 1943.
[19] Steve Joshua Heims, The Cybernetics Group: Constructing a Social
Science for Postwar America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). Edwards,
The Closed World, Chapter 6, Kay, "Cybernetics, Information,
Life," 47.
[20] Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy," 253.
[21] R.B. Blackman, H.W. Bode, and C.E. Shannon, “Data Smoothing and Prediction
in Fire-Control Systems,” in Harold Hazen, Summary Technical Report
of Division 7, NDRC Volume I: Gunfire Control (Washington:
Office of Scientific Research and Development, National Defense Research
Committee, 1946). Also see H.W. Bode and C.E. Shannon, “A Simplified
Derivation of Linear Least Square Smoothing and Prediction Theory,”
Proc. I.R.E. 38 (April, 1950) 425, which addresses Wiener’s
prediction in more detail. Also see R.B. Blackman, Linear Data-Smoothing
and Prediction in Theory and Practice (Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley,
1965), an extension of the 1948 work.
[22] Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” BSTJ
27 (July-October, 1048), 379-423, 623-656, reprinted in N.J.A. Sloane
and Aaron D. Wyner, ed., Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers
(New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 5-83. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver,
The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana and Chicago:
Univeristy of Illinois Press, 1949). The relationship between Shannon
and Wiener’s work is more complex than outlined here. In a later interview,
Shannon related “I don’t think Wiener had much to do with information
theory. He wasn’t a big influence on my ideas there [at MIT], though
I once took a course from him.” Shannon, Collected Papers,
xix. Semantic confusion sometimes exists over the “Weaver-Shannon”
or the “Wiener-Shannon,” theory of communication. The former derives
from the book listed in the previous note, and is inaccurate because
Weaver served only to translate Shannon’s work to make it more accessible
(Weaver claimed no more).
[23] Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 36.
[24] Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication.
[25] Claude Shannon, The Bandwagon, IEEE Transactions on Information
Theory, volume 2, March, 1956. Reprinted in Sloane and Wyner,
eds., Collected Works, 462.
[31] Robert Vallée, “The ‘Cercle d'Etudes Cybernétiques’”, Systems Research,
7 (1990) 205. More directly on the role of de Broglie, see Robert Vallée, “Louis
de Broglie and Cybernetics", Kybernetes, N°2, 19 (1990)
32-33.
[32] Among the forty members, on finds Couffignal, Dubarle, Ducrocq, Latil,
Lafitte and Mandelbrot, all scientists who played an important role
in the introduction of cybernetics in France.
[34] Métral does not mention the contacts that some of the participants
had with American researchers, nor the existence of a similar congress,
“on automatic regulator and servo-mechanisms”, held in London in May
1947.
[35] Archives of the C.N.A.M., folder ‘Conférences d’actualité scientifique’,
1947.
[43] The communist Party was still the first Party at the legislative elections
from June 17th 1951 (with 26,5%) but its influence in the
intellectual world was not so decisive.
[48] Interview with André Lentin conducted on June 20th, 1997.
[55] See the first volume of Information and Control, published
1958.
[59] Ivan Ia. Aksenov, Iurii Ia. Bazilevskii, and R.R. Vasil’ev, “Otchet ob
itogakh II Mezhdunarodnogo kongressa po kibernetike”; Russian Academy
of Sciences Archive (Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk), f. 395, op.
17, d. 47, l. 43.
[60] Kirillin and Monin to the Central Committee, July 13, 1960; Center
for Preservation of Contemporary Documentation (Tsentr Khraneniia
Sovremennoi Dokumentatsii [hereafter TsKhSD]), f. 5, op. 35, d. 134,
ll. 55-56.
[61] “Kibernetika,” in Mark Rozental’ and Pavel Iudin, eds., Kratkii
filosofskii slovar’ (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1954), pp. 236-37.
[62] On the history of Soviet cybernetics, see Boris V. Biriukov, ed.,
Kibernetika: proshloe dlia budushchego. Etiudy po istorii otechestvennoi
kibernetiki (Moscow: Nauka, 1989); Slava Gerovitch, “Striving
for ‘Optimal Control’: Soviet Cybernetics as a ‘Science of Government,’”
in Miriam R. Levin, ed., Cultures of Control in the Machine Age
(Harwood Academic Publishers, forthcoming); Richard D. Gillespie,
“The Politics of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union,” in Albert H. Teich,
ed., Scientists and Public Affairs (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1974), pp. 239-98; Loren R. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human
Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987), chap. 8; David Holloway, “Innovation in Science—the Case of
Cybernetics in the Soviet Union,” Science Studies 4 (1974):
299-337; Lee Kerschner, “Cybernetics: Key to the Future?” Problems
of Communism 14 (November-December 1965): 56-66; Dmitrii A. Pospelov
and Iakov I. Fet, eds. and comps., Ocherki istorii informatiki
v Rossii (Novosibirsk: OIGGM SO RAN, 1998).
[63] Both Wiener and Shannon were indebted to Russian scientists for important
insights. Wiener was influenced by the works of the Russian mathematicians
Nikolai Bogoliubov, Andrei Kolmogorov, and Nikolai Krylov, physiologist
Ivan Pavlov, and linguist Roman Jakobson; see Wiener, Cybernetics,
pp. 11, 59, 127; Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings:
Cybernetics and Society [1950, 1954] (New York: Avon Books, 1967),
p. 255. Shannon employed the apparatus of “Markov processes,” developed
by the Russian mathematician Andrei Markov, Sr., in the early twentieth
century for the same problem of stochastic description of natural
language texts; see Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical
Theory of Communication (Urbana, Ill.: The University of Illinois
Press, 1949), p. 45; Andrei A. Markov, “Primer statisticheskogo issledovaniia
nad tekstom ‘Evgeniia Onegina’ illiustriruiushchii sviaz’ ispytanii
v tsep’,” Izvestiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk (1913): 153-62.
[64] Bernard E. Bykhovskii, “Nauka sovremennykh rabovladel’tsev,” Nauka
i zhizn’, no. 6 (1953): 44.
[65] Teodor K. Gladkov, “Kibernetika—psevdonauka o mashinax, zhivotnykh,
cheloveke i obshchestve,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta,
no. 1 (1955): 61.
[66] Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1961), p. 132.
[67] Bykhovskii, “Nauka sovremennykh rabovladel’tsev,” p. 44.
[68] Zheleznov, “Predislovie,” p. 6.
[69] One Soviet author cited André Lentin’s critique of cybernetics with
strong approval; see Materialist [pseudonym], “Whom Does Cybernetics
Serve?” [1953], trans. Alexander D. Paul, Soviet Cybernetics Review
4:2 (1974): 41.
[70] In his anti-genetics speech at the July-August 1948 session of the
Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, personally edited
and approved by Stalin, Lysenko attacked Schrödinger’s book, What
Is Life?, for bringing physical methods into biology. See Kirill
Rossianov, “Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the ‘New’ Soviet Biology,”
Isis 84:4 (December 1993): 728-45.
[71] Trofim D. Lysenko, “In Response to an Article by A.N. Kolmogoroff,”
Comptes Rendus (Doklady) de l’Académie des Sciences de l’URSS
28:9 (1940): 833.
[72] See André N. Kolmogoroff, “Sur l’interpolation et extrapolation des suites
stationnaires,” Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences de Paris
208 (1939): 2043-45; Andrei N. Kolmogorov, “Statsionarnye posledovatel’nosti
v gil’bertovom prostranstve,” Biulleten’ MGU. Matematika 2:6
(1941): 1-40; Andrei N. Kolmogorov, “Interpolirovanie i ekstrapolirovanie
statsionarnykh sluchainykh posledovatel’nostei,” Izvestiia AN SSSR.
Matematika
5 (1941): 3-14. Referring to the 1949 publication of Wiener’s book,
Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time
Series, Peter Whittle has concluded: “Kolmogorov and Wiener are
generally given joint credit for the development of the prediction
theory of stationary processes. This surely constitutes insufficient
recognition of Kolmogorov’s clear ten-year priority,” (Peter Whittle,
“Kolmogorov’s Contributions to the Theory of Stationary Processes,”
The Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society 22 (1990):
84); cf. Pesi R. Masani, Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964 (Basel:
Birkhäuser Verlag, 1990), pp. 193-95. As stated above, Wiener’s report
was already in restricted circulation in 1942, which still gives Kolmogorov
a lead.
[73] Kolmogorov recalled that at the International Mathematical Congress
in Amsterdam in 1954 he, a Russian, had to argue the importance of
Shannon’s information theory before American mathematicians, who were
skeptical about the mathematical value of this engineer’s work; see
Andrei N. Kolmogorov, “Predislovie,” in Klod Shennon [Claude Shannon],
Paboty po teorii informatsii i kibernetike, trans. from English
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoi literatury, 1963), p. 5.
[74] See Andrei N. Kolmogorov, Izrail’ M. Gelfand, and Akiva M. Yaglom,
“Amount of Information and Entropy for Continuous Distributions,”
[1958] in Al’bert N. Shiryayev, ed., Selected Works of A.N. Kolmogorov,
vol. III: Information Theory and the Theory of Algorithms,
trans. Aleksei B. Sossinsky (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1993), p. 33, fn. 1.
[75] Nikolai S. Simonov, Voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks SSSR v 1920-1950-e
gody: tempy ekonomicheskogo rosta, struktura, organizatsiia proizvodstva
i upravleniie (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996), pp. 259-60.
[76] “Vazhneishie zadachi razvitiia nauki v shestoi piatiletke,” October
1955; Center for Preservation of Contemporary Documentation (Tsentr
Khraneniia Sovremennoi Dokumentatsii [TsKhSD]), f. 5, op. 35, d. 3,
l. 6.
[77] Rumiantsev to the Central Committee, August 9, 1955; TsKhSD, f. 5,
op. 17, d. 509, l. 214.
[78] Sergei L. Sobolev, Anatolii I. Kitov, and Aleksei A. Liapunov, “Osnovnye
cherty kibernetiki,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 4 (1955): 140.
[80] Andrei N. Kolmogorov, “Intervention at the Session,” [1956] in Shiryayev,
ed., Selected Works of A.N. Kolmogorov, vol. III, p. 32.
[81] Igor’ A. Poletaev, Signal: O nekotorykh poniatiiakh kibernetiki
(Moscow: Sovetskoe radio, 1958), p. 23.
[82] See Aleksei A. Liapunov and Sergei V. Iablonskii, “Teoreticheskie
problemy kibernetiki,” [1963] in Aleksei A. Liapunov, Problemy
teoreticheskoi i prikladnoi kibernetiki, ed. Sergei L. Sobolev
(Moscow: Nauka, 1980), pp. 71-88.
[83] In 1959, the Laboratory began publishing the journal Problemy peredachi
informatsii, which since 1965 has been also published in the Engish
translation as Problems of Information Transmission.
[84] In his recent study of the subcultures of instrumentation, experiment,
and theory within the larger culture of microphysics, Peter Galison
calls a “trading zone” the area where, despite the vast differences
in their symbolic and cultural systems, different groups can collaborate.
See Peter L. Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), esp.
ch. 9.
[85] Raisa L. Berg, Acquired Traits: Memoirs of a Geneticist from the
Soviet Union, trans. David Lowe (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 220.
[86] Sergei L. Sobolev, “Vystuplenie na soveshchanii,” in Petr N. Fedoseev,
ed., Filosofskie problemy sovremennogo estestvoznaniia (Moscow:
AN SSSR, 1959), p. 266.
[87] Sergei L. Sobolev and Aleksei A. Liapunov, “Kibernetika i estestvoznanie,”
in Fedoseev, ed., Filosofskie problemy, p. 252.
[88] Raisa L. Berg and Aleksei A. Liapunov, “Predislovie,” in Ivan I. Shmal’gausen,
Kiberneticheskie voprosy biologii (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1968),
p. 13.
[89] Jakobson to Shannon, April 24, 1951; Jakobson papers, MIT MC 72, box
45.21.
[90] See Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Communication Theory,” [1960]
in Idem, Selected Writings, vol. II: Word and Language
(The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), pp. 570-79.
[91] Claude E. Shannon, “The Redundancy of English,” in Cybernetics:
Transactions of the Seventh Macy Conference (New York, 1951),
p. 157. See also Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Communication Theory,”
p. 578.
[92] Igor’ A. Mel’cuk, Cybernetics and Linguistics: Some Reasons for
as Well as Some Consequences of Bringing Them Together (Vienna:
Osterr. Studienges. f. Kybernetik, 1977), p. 15.
[93] Akiva M. Iaglom and Isaak M. Iaglom, Probability and Information,
trans. V.K. Jain (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), pp. 198-201.
[94] Andrei S. Monin, “Dorogi v Komarovku,” in Al’bert N. Shiriaev, ed.,
Kolmogorov v vospominaniiakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), p. 484.
[95] Andrei N. Kolmogorov, “Three Approaches to the Definition of the Notion
of Amount of Information,” [1965] in Shiryayev, ed., Selected Works
of A.N. Kolmogorov, vol. III, p. 188.
[97] Andrei N. Kolmogorov, “The Combinatorial Foundations of Information
Theory and the Probability Calculus,” [1983] in Shiryayev, ed., Selected
Works of A.N. Kolmogorov, vol. III, p. 210.
[98] Kolmogorov, “Three Approaches,” p. 192.
[99] David G. Kendall, “Kolmogorov: The Man and His Work,” The Bulletin
of the London Mathematical Society 22 (1990): 40.
[100] Andrei N. Kolmogorov, “Kibernetika,” in Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia,
2nd ed., vol. 51 (1958), p. 149.
[101] Andrei N. Kolmogorov, “Informatsiia,” in Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia,
2nd ed., vol. 51 (1958), p. 129.
[102] Andrei A. Markov, “Chto takoe kibernetika?” in Aksel’ I. Berg et
al., eds., Kibernetika. Myshlenie. Zhizn’ (Moscow: Mysl’,
1964), p. 41. Andrei Markov, Jr., was the son of the author of “Markov
processes.”
[103] Il’ia B. Novik, Kibernetika: filosofskie i sotsiologicheskie problemy
(Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1963), p. 80. On Soviet philosophical discussions
of the concept of information, see Graham, Science, Philosophy,
and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union, pp. 281-93.
|