Norbert Wiener

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Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener, (November 26, 1894 – March 18, 1964)
was an American mathematician and founder of cybernetics. From 1919 until 1960, Wiener was professor at MIT. In his 1948 book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, he describes how a chess program could be developed using a depth-limited minimax search with an evaluation function.

Photos

Gonzalo Torres y Quevedo demonstrates El Ajedrecista
to Norbert Wiener, Paris Cybernetic Congress 1951

Quotes

Quote from Science in Rewiew: Cybernetics, a New Science

Professor Wiener assures us that a mechanical chess player could be constructed that "might very well be as good a player as the vast majority of the human race." Since each mechanical brain provides the knowledge with which to build a better mechanical brain, it is conceivable that eventually we may build a better mechanical brain, it is conceivable that eventually we may build machines that will surpass the best human brains in thinking capacity, that may not only do all man's work for him but also solve such problems as the control of the atomic bomb and how to reconcile east and west. All that would be left for man to do would be to devise ways to stop the machine from destroying him. 

Quote by Norbert Wiener from Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth

The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation. 

Selected Publications

• Norbert Wiener (1913). A Comparison Between the Treatment of the Algebra of Relatives by Schroeder and that by Whitehead and Russell. Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University
• Norbert Wiener (1948). Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT Press
• Norbert Wiener (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin,
• Norbert Wiener (1953). Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth. MIT Press
• Norbert Wiener (1954). Men, Machines, and the World About Them. Medicine and Science, pdf
• Norbert Wiener (1964). God & Golem, Inc. MIT Press, pdf reprint
• Gordon S. Brown, Norbert Wiener (1984). Automation, 1955: A Retrospective. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 6, No. 4
• Pesi R. Masani (1990). Norbert Wiener 1894–1964. Vita Mathematica
• David Mindell, Jérôme Segal, Slava Gerovitch (2003). Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France and the Soviet Union. in Mark Walker (ed.) (2003). Science and Ideology: A Comparative History. Routledge » Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, covers the 1951 Paris Cybernetic Congress

See also

• History of Computer Chess.
• Leonardo Torres y Quevedo

External Links

• Norbert Wiener from Wikipedia
• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Norbert Wiener
• Details for Norbert Wiener - Oberwolfach Photo Collection
• The Cybernetic Delirium of Norbert Wiener by Stephen Pfohl
• M.I.T. Scholar’s 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found by John Markoff, The New York Times, May 20, 2013
• Norbert Wiener - Men, Machines, and the World About Them (1950), Norbert Wiener begins speaking around 13:30, YouTube Video (Audio)

References

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