This webpage discusses the electronic publication of W. Ross Ashby's seminal work 'Introduction to Cybernetics', originally published in 1956. Principia Cybernetica has made this classic text available online, thanks to permissions from the Ashby estate, allowing for wide access. The book is praised for its clear, simple, yet profound insights into cybernetics and systems theory, introducing fundamental concepts like the homeostat, the law of requisite variety, and the principle of self-organization. It's formatted as a PDF for easy reading and printing.
A theory has been developed that characterizes how rattling is related to the amount of time that a system spends in a state, explaining self-organization in nonequilibrium systems such as bacterial colonies, protein complexes, and hybrid materials.
Stephen Wolfram discusses the mysteries of machine learning and offers some minimal models to understand the essence of neural nets and their learning process.
