UK Cybernetics Society 2009 Annual Conference

Kybernetes

ISSN: 0368-492X

Article publication date: 16 March 2010

45

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2010), "UK Cybernetics Society 2009 Annual Conference", Kybernetes, Vol. 39 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2010.06739aab.010

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


UK Cybernetics Society 2009 Annual Conference

Article Type: News, conferences and technical reports From: Kybernetes, Volume 39, Issue 1

The conference was held on Saturday 12 September in King’s College, London, and was another successful event with a varied programme. There were eight presentations in all, four in the morning and four in the afternoon. There was no admission charge, though there was a suggestion that newcomers might apply to join the Society. The event was well attended with something over 30 participants.

As for the 2006 conference, reported in Kybernetes Vol. 36, No. 1, 2007, pp. 118-21, and the 2008 one (Kybernetes Vol. 38, No. 1/2, 2009, pp. 265-7) the preliminary arrangements were admirable, with biographical notes and photographs of the speakers shown on the Society’s web site at www.cybsoc.org, along with abstracts of the presentations.

The first talk was by John Williamson of Glasgow University and formerly of CERN and Philips Research Laboratories, on: “Complexity from Simplicity: The Nature of Light and Matter”. He extended the theoretical treatment, he had introduced at the 2008 event and referred to an earlier publication by himself and van der Mark, as well as to a new paper available in draft form at: www.cybsoc.org/electremdense2008v3.pdf. Each of these, as well as a video of the 2008 presentation, can be opened by clicking on highlighted entries in the abstract as it appears on the Cybernetics Society web site.

The treatment provides a new basis for fundamental physics, with “energy enfolded into the complexity of matter”. The mathematics requires postulation of 11-dimensional space, with one of the dimensions that of an observer. Much of existing theory is accounted for and harmonized, and for the first time a value for the charge of an electron is derived as a theoretical result.

The second presentation of the morning was by Artemis Papert, daughter of Seymour Papert who worked with Minsky in MIT and earlier with Piaget in Switzerland, and who invented the Logo Turtle, controlled as part of the computing language Logo devised primarily as an educational tool. The title of the presentation was: “In the beginning was the Turtle” and examples were shown of beautiful coloured pictures produced by simple programs, especially when the facility of procedure or function calling was used to allow the operation of one program to be reproduced with variations within another. (An important educational advantage of Logo over alternatives such as Basic is that it encourages such a structured or nested approach.) Some of the pictures shown had fractal character. Here, again extra material can be found by clicking on highlighted entries in the abstract as it appears on the web site, including a very fine collection of art work at: www.turtleart.org

The third presentation of the morning session was by Professor Robert Vallée, President of the WOSC and among other honours an Emeritus Professor of the University of Paris-Nord. His title was: “Observation operators revisited” and he was able to refer to his own work published as early as 1951 and presented more fully in Vallée (1995) (in French) and in a particular aspect in this journal (Vallée, 2006). He postulates a mathematical “observation operator” that is a formal representation of the process of perception as a mapping. The theory is developed in detail, with reference to updating of the mapping through time and application of a “pragmatic inverse transfer” to determine action. It is interesting that the original publication was under the aegis of Louis de Broglie, who was also mentioned by the first speaker, John Williamson, as putting forward theory in physics having some correspondence to his.

The last speaker of the morning session was Alex Andrew, with the topic: “Strong AI, continuity and evolution”. The “strong AI” position has been epitomised in a claim that there is no essential difference between a room thermostat “knowing” that a room is warm or cold, and a person making the same judgement. I defended the claim by pointing out that the human body embodies a very precise regulator of central temperature, operating without conscious activation, though there are also behavioural controls depending on consciousness. Consciousness is invoked only when functionally necessary.

At the same time, there is no doubt that the achievements of AI have been disappointing, and it is argued in my recent book (Andrew, 2009) that one reason for this is failure to acknowledge continuity. There are implications of this for evolution, referred to in the book but perhaps with less attention than they merit. They will be developed more fully in a further publication.

There was little time for discussion immediately following the talk but during the lunch break Ranulph Glanville put it to me that any “intelligence” attributed to machines could be seen as merely a manifestation of the intelligence of the programmer. This is a similar argument to one I had mentioned in my talk, to the effect that the meaning of “intelligence” is vague and the very fact that a form of behaviour is achieved by a machine encourages denial that it should be classed as “intelligence”. There is an important point at issue here, since Ranulph’s argument could be taken further to suggest there is no possibility of modelling the basic mechanisms of intelligence, even by methods that include neurophysiological observations. This would be contrary to the avowed aims of McCulloch and Pitts and arguably also of Wiener.

One reason that time was short at the start of the lunch break was that I was honoured with presentation of the Norbert Wiener Gold Medal of WOSC, presented by Professor Vallée as President. It was originally intended that the presentation would be at the 2008 WOSC Congress in Wrocław in Poland, which I was unable to attend. Also during the lunch break, I was presented with the 2009 Outstanding Reviewer Award of the Emerald Literati Network for work on Kybernetes in 2008.

The first paper in the afternoon was by Helmut Nechansky, a consulting engineer in Vienna, on: “Cybernetics as science of decision-making”. The operation of decisions as part of a feedback loop was discussed, and Beer’s viable system model was compared with the Living Systems Theory of James Grier Miller published in 1978. The latter, according to its Wikipedia entry, lists 20 critical subsystems of any living entity, a somewhat larger number than required by Beer’s VSM. The two treatments were analyzed by the speaker and presented in one comparable scheme. Here, again a substantial list of references to Nechansky’s publications can be accessed by clicking on a highlighted entry in the abstract on the web site.

The second paper in the afternoon was by David Buckley, founder of Foundation Robotics, on: “A tour of European historical robots and cybernetic art”. The speaker had brought along a walking robot in the form of a pair of mechanical legs about a metre high, with sensors and actuators that allowed them to balance and to walk slowly. His talk ranged widely, as its title suggests, but was largely about relatively simple robots of the “tortoise” type including the pioneering construction by Grey Walter. Great trouble had been taken to find remains of original devices and to talk to people who had been involved, in Paris and many other centres. It was interesting to learn that the computer pioneer Heinz Zemanek of Vienna had constructed his own versions of the Grey Walter tortoise and Ashby’s homeostat, just to get a true feeling for the thinking behind them.

The third of the afternoon’s papers was by Janos Korn on: “Science and design of systems” which is the title of his new book (Korn, 2009). It was a thoughtful discussion of the nature of system modelling in terms of relations and interactions and means of applying the results to achieve an outcome.

The last presentation was by the well-known Julia Reichardt who has been Deputy Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and organizer of the acclaimed Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition there in 1968. She is a Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and author of numerous books and has organized or been involved with many interesting exhibitions. Her subject was: “Frankenstein again” and in her abstract she observes “The Frankenstein Monster is 200 years old and still relevant. Whether made out of meat, plastic, electronic components or on the internet, the generation of new beings gives us more problems than we can solve”, and she asks: “why?”

 Figure 2 (Right to left) Professor Vallée (WOSC President), Professor
Smith (President Cyb. Soc.), Madam Vallée

Figure 2 (Right to left) Professor Vallée (WOSC President), Professor Smith (President Cyb. Soc.), Madam Vallée

Whether she fully answered the question is difficult to say, but she gave a fascinating and polished presentation in which she asked what constitutes a “monster”, with pictures of distorted faces demonstrating that the “monster” quality depends on a certain degree of distortion that however must not be enough to make the object unrealistic as a face. She discussed the origin of the Frankenstein story and its reincarnations including that where a sex angle was introduced by creation of a bride. She also mentioned the “freak shows” of Victorian times and travelling circuses and a horrific picture by Goya representing the prospect of civil war. She included results of artificial intelligence, particularly with reference to neural nets and Conway’s “game of life”, and to Artificial Life, the latter both as a computer study and in the expected laboratory production of living cells. She also quoted Andy Warhol as saying he would like to be a machine, and the view of Marvin Minsky that memory content might be downloaded to computer storage. Reference was also made to the Tin Man of the Wizard of Oz film. It can be seen that this was a wide-ranging and thought-provoking survey.

Once again the Chairman of the Society, Professor Martin Smith, is to be congratulated on putting together the rich and varied programme, as is also Nick Green for his part and especially for the web site presentation.

The conference ended with the usual celebratory dinner (Figure 2) which marked another successful annual event.

Alex M. Andrew

References

Andrew, A.M. (2009), A Missing Link in Cybernetics: Logic and Continuity, Springer, New York, NY

Korn, J. (2009), Science and Design of Systems, Matador, Leicester

Vallée, R. (1995), Cognition et Système: Essai d’Epistémo-Praxéologie, l’Interdiscipliaire, Limonest

Vallée, R. (2006), “Inverse transfer and epistemo-praxiology”, The International Journal of Cybernetics, Systems and Management science, Vol. 35 Nos 7/8, pp. 1232–5

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