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Bringing energy into Engineering Cybernetics (control)
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The "cybernetics" of Wiener ("Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine," John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1948) is the science of organization of mechanical and electrical components for stability and purposeful actions.
A distinguishing feature of this new science is the total absence of considerations of energy, heat, and efficiency, which are so important in other natural sciences. In fact, the primary concern of cybernetics is on the qualitative aspects of the interrelations among the various components of a system and the synthetic behavior of the complete mechanism.
The purpose of "Engineering Cybernetics" is then to study those parts of the broad science of cybernetics which have direct engineering applications in designing controlled or guided systems.
The above three paragraphs are exerpted from Tsien Hsue-Shen's Engineering Cybernetics, which was published over half a century ago. Back then, the observation that "this new science is the totally absent of considerations of energy, heat, and efficiency" was certainly valid. Actually it was quite sharp and insightful. Thus ever since then, Engineering Cybernetics (control engineering) has been categorized by many researchers as an information science, or even as a branch of applied mathematics.
But things have changed. Bringing energy, heat, and efficiency into Engineering Cybernetics (control) nowadays is the big trend, and attracts more and more attentions. Along this trend, one may predict that physics experiments, rather than mathematical derivations and numerical simulations, would be more and more important for control researchers. And hopefully, this change would rescue Engineering Cybernetics (control) by preventing it from being absorbed into information science or applied mathematics, considering the saying "Control is Dead? http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-344686.html" by Professor Ho Yu-Chi http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1565.
https://m.sciencenet.cn/blog-286797-599687.html
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