W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive

The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive has been recently launched. Ashby was one of the most prominent Cyberneticians. His work has been only recently rediscovered, which includes great contributions to the study of the brain, systems, adaptation, and self-organization. He has been an inspiration for my work on self-organizing systems.

The digital archive includes Ashby's journal, biographies, pictures, bibliography, a few letters (I didn't know that he was acquainted with Turing...), and aphorisms (one of my weak spots (in need of an update)). A couple of them that I liked especially:
  • A "system" is a set of variables sufficiently isolated to stay [constant] long enough for us to discuss it.
  • Science is the Observer's Digest.

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