Editorial

Kybernetes

ISSN: 0368-492X

Article publication date: 1 December 2000

320

Citation

Rudall, B.H. (2000), "Editorial", Kybernetes, Vol. 29 No. 9/10. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2000.06729iaa.001

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2000, MCB UP Limited


Editorial

This is the final part of our series of special issues published to mark the new millennium[1] and to commemorate the pioneering contributions of the scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who laid the foundations for cybernetics and systems as we know them today.

There can be no doubt as to the variety of contributions that have been published in the series. All that have been included are both original and innovative in their approaches to research and development in the systems and cybernetics fields. For every paper that has been selected and published in our new millennium special issues series, there are many of high quality and interest which for reasons of space alone could not be included.

Even so, it is encouraging to hear that so many of these authors are not discouraged and that they have indicated that they will continue with their researches and development projects. Hopefully, into the new century, we will be able to publish the results of their endeavours and highlight in this journal their new contributions to our worldwide community.

The current works published here, and also those we could not accommodate, will form the basis of the new and exciting areas for research and exploration in the future. It was Norbert Wiener, whose work we have already discussed in the Preface to Part I of this series, who said of the passing years (Wiener, 1948, 1961):

… If a scientific subject has real vitality, the center of interest in it must and should shift in the course of years … it behoves the cybernetist to move on to new fields and to transfer a large part of his attention to ideas which have arisen in the development of the last decade.

B. H. Rudall

Note1. Cybernetics and systems in the new millennium, Kybernetes, Volume 29 Part I, Nos 5/6; Part II, Nos 7/8; Part III, Nos 9/10.

ReferencesWiener, N. (1948), "Cybernetics or control and communications in the animal and the machine", Actualities Sci. Ind., No. 1053; Hermann et Cie, Paris; The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and Wiley, New York, NY, 1948; Math. Rev., No. 9 (1948), p. 598, partly reprinted as "Rigidity and learning: ants and men", Classics in Biology (A Course of Selected Reading by Authorities), Philosophical Library, New York, NY, 1960, pp. 205-13.Wiener, N. (1961), Cybernetics, 2nd ed. of Wiener (1948), revisions and two additional chapters, MIT Press and Wiley, New York, paperback edition, MIT Press, 1965.

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