Library Person
W. Ross Ashby
English psychiatrist and cyberneticist; formulated the Law of Requisite Variety.
W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) was an English psychiatrist who became, after Norbert Wiener, cybernetics’ major theoretician. In 1948 he built the homeostat, an electromechanical device that demonstrated self-regulating, adaptive behavior, described in Design for a Brain (1952). An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956) gave the field its first systematic mathematical treatment and introduced the Law of Requisite Variety — only variety can destroy variety, so a regulator can reduce a system’s disorder only to the extent that the regulator itself possesses at least as much variety in its own possible responses. Ashby was also a member of London’s Ratio Club (1949–1958), the informal group of British cyberneticists that included Alan Turing and Grey Walter.
Works in the Library
W. Ross Ashby CONCEPT
In cybernetics, the number of distinguishable states a system can take on — and, per Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, the true measure of a regulator's power to control.
CYBERNETICS