p.13 Mr. Bigelow and I came to the conclusion that an extremely
important factor in voluntary activity is what the control engineers term feed-back.
p.19 We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication
theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek [word
for] steersman.
p.35 I have just spoken of a field in which my expectations of cybernetics are definitely tempered by an
understanding of the limitations of the data which we may hope to obtain.
p.104 This [equation presented above] is precisely the result which the author and Shannon have already
obtained for the rate of transmission of information in this case. [It seems that Shannon and Wiener have previously collaborated
on another matter involving information theory*]
p.184 As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at
one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their
own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own
minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies
of material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited by the impossibility of classifying a book
under an unfamiliar heading unless some particular person has already recognized the relevance of that heading for that particular
book. [JLJ - maybe this was how Google got started]
p.190-191 It is in the social sciences that the coupling between the observed phenomenon and the observer
is hardest to minimize... We are too much in tune with the objects of our investigation to be good probes. In short, whether
our investigations in the social sciences be statistical or dynamic - and they should participate in the nature of both -
they can never be good to more than a few decimal places, and, in short, can never furnish us with a quantity of verificable,
significant information which begins to compare with that which we have learned to expect in the natural sciences.
p.193 There is one question which properly belongs to this chapter [Information,
Language, and Society], though it in no sense represents a culmination of its argument. It is the question whether
it is possible to construct a chessplaying machine, and whether this sort of ability represents an essential difference
between the potentialities of the machine and the mind... The real problem is... to construct a machine which shall
offer interesting opposition to a player at some one of the many levels at which human chess players find themselves.
I think is is possible to construct a relatively crude, but
not altogether trivial, apparatus for this purpose... To each sequence of moves it should assign a certain conventional
valuation. Here, to checkmate the opponent receives the highest valuation at each stage, to be checkmated the lowest ; while
losing pieces, taking opponents' pieces, checking, and other recognizable situations, should receive valuations not too remote
from those which good players would assign them... At the stage at which the machine is to play once and the opponent once,
the valuation of a play by the machine is the minimum valuation of the situation after the opponent has made all possible
plays. At the stage where the machine is to play twice and the opponent twice, the valuation of a play by the machine is the
minimum with respect to the opponent's first play of the maximum valuation of the plays by the machine at the stage when there
is only one play of the opponent and one by the machine to follow. This process can be extended to the case when each player
makes three plays, and so on. Then the machine chooses any one of the plays giving the maximum valuation for the stage n
plays ahead, where n has some value on which the designer of the machine has decided. This makes as its definitive
play.
Such a machine would not only play legal chess,
but a chess not so manifestly bad as to be ridiculous... it may attain a pretty fair level of accomplishment.
*From Dark Hero of the Information Age, by Conway and Siegelman: p.125-126 One member of that inner circle
[JLJ - familiar with Wiener's WWII -era ideas and concepts] ... was the young mathematician Claude E. Shannon, a recent
MIT Ph.D. and a new hire at Bell Labs... Early in the war, Shannon came to learn Wiener's new communications theories
at the source. Bigelow [JLJ - a colleague of Wiener] was present at many meetings between the two men where he watched
Wiener give liberally of his ideas to his younger colleague... In fact, Bigelow said that one of his strongest recollections
was "seeing Wiener giving Shannon advice, help and ideas over and over again... I think Wiener was the support for
Shannon's ideas and much of his thinking on information theory."
