Download 10 - Computing and Cybernetics in the Soviet Union.pptx

History 329/SI 311/RCSSCI 360
Computers and the Internet:
A global history
Week 6: Computing and Cybernetics in the Soviet Union
Today
} 
} 
} 
} 
} 
Review
Cybernetics: minds, brains, and machines
Soviet computing and cybernetics
Soviet economic planning
Next time
Review: SAGE
Origin: Whirlwind digital computer project, MIT
}  SAGE = Semi-Automatic Ground Environment
}  Computer-controlled air defense of lower 48 states
}  Networked over telephone lines
}  Duplexed (two computers for high reliability)
}  Tube-based central processors made by IBM
}  Magnetic core memory
}  First truly large software development
}  Served as a pattern for many subsequent military projects
}  Major factor in US and IBM dominance of commercial
computer markets by late1950s
} 
Cybernetics:
minds, brains, and machines
Key figures
} 
Norbert Wiener
} 
} 
Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts
} 
} 
neural nets
John von Neumann
} 
} 
cybernetics
brain modeling, cellular automata, biological metaphors
Frank Rosenblatt
} 
perceptrons
The Cybernetics Group
} 
Norbert Wiener, MIT
} 
} 
WWII anti-aircraft problems
Servo/organism analogies
} 
“Behavior, Purpose, and
Teleology” (1943)
} 
} 
Information as measurable quantity
Feedback: circular self-corrective cycles
attain. Thus,
system
dog
likely
it does not permit the integration of input and output necessary for the performance of a predictive reaction of the third or fourth order. Indeed, it is
possible that one of the features of the discontinuity of behavior observable when
comparing humans with other high mammals may lie in that the other mammals are limited to predictive behavior of a low order, whereas man may be
capable potentially of quite high orders of prediction.
The classification of behavior suggested so far is tabulated here:
Wiener and Bigelow,
“Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology” (1943)
Feed-back
(teleological)
Purposeful
Active
Behavior
Non
active
(passive)
I ~~|
~
Non-feedback (non-
teleo-
logical)
Non-purposeful (random)
Predictive
(extrapolative)
Non-predictive (nonextrapolative)
First-,
second-, etc.
orders of
prediction
Servomechanisms
The Cybernetics Group
Wiener, Cybernetics: Control and
Communication in the Animal and
the Machine (1948)
}  Information theory
} 
} 
Information as “negative entropy”
Neurons
} 
The human brain
} 
} 
1011 neurons
1014 synapses
The Cybernetics Group
} 
Warren McCulloch (neurologist) and
Walter Pitts (logician)
} 
} 
Neural networks
“A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in
Nervous Activity” (1943)
} 
} 
} 
Neurons as on-off switches
Ideas taken from Turing, “On Computable
Numbers”
Did not expect to be taken seriously
Basic units of computation in the brain?
Figure 1. Location of the essential nonlinearity. (Zador 2000, Nature)
(a) Standard model of processing. Inputs 1−n from other neurons are multiplied by the
corresponding passive synaptic weights w, summed (sum) and then passed through a
nonlinearity (S). (b) An alternative model of processing in which the synapses themselves provide
the essential nonlinearity.
The Cybernetics Group
} 
Claude Shannon, Bell Laboratories
} 
“The Mathematical Theory of
Communication” (1948)
Shannon and Weaver, 1948
The Macy Conferences (1946-53)
} 
“Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback
Mechanism in Biological and Social
Systems”
} 
} 
Organizers: McCulloch, Wiener, von Neumann
Invitees:
} 
} 
} 
} 
} 
} 
} 
Margaret Mead
Gregory Bateson
Claude Shannon
Walter Pitts
W. Ross Ashby (1948: Design for a Brain)
J. C. R. Licklider (later, sponsored ARPAnet)
Servo/organism, computer/brain analogies
“Giant brains”
} 
} 
1940s-50s: calculation, logic, science as
paradigms of intelligence
The EDVAC report (1945)
} 
} 
} 
} 
Computer discussed as logic machine, not as
electronic circuits
Logical elements = neurons
Storage = memory
von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain
(1958)
} 
} 
} 
Brain as switching system
1010 neurons, each with as many as 1000 synaptic
connections
Doubted whether comparison with computers
would hold
1949
Brain modeling,
1940s-1950s
} 
} 
} 
Dominant approach, 1940s-50s
Neurons as units which summed inputs
Assumption: brain not highly structured
} 
Neurons as a self-organizing system
} 
} 
} 
Perceptrons (F. Rosenblatt, 1958)
Turned out not to be true
Paradigm: learning
A 3-layer perceptron
Artificial intelligence: stages of development
} 
} 
} 
} 
General intelligence (1950s-60s)
Microworlds (1960s-70s)
Expert systems (1970s-80s)
Return to biological models (1980s-90s)
} 
} 
} 
} 
Neural nets/connectionism
Robot bugs
Genetic algorithms
Integration into other forms of computing (1990s-2000s)
Soviet computing and
cybernetics
Gerovitch: “Soviet scientists were thus torn
between two competing slogans: ‘Overtake and
Surpass!’ and ‘Criticize and Destroy!’”
“The Great Transformation of Nature”
} 
Drought in 1946 led to famine
} 
} 
1 million deaths
Stalin: “Nature needs to be transformed to serve
mankind”
1940s and early 50s: Cybernetics as an
American “pseudoscience”
} 
1940s: a “scientific heresy”
} 
} 
Linked to electronic computing, human-computer analogies
Soviet state campaigned against many Western scientific
ideas at this time
} 
} 
Genetics, psychological theories, Einstein’s theories
Campaign against cybernetics was similar
Sergei Lebedev
Studied and later taught electrical engineering at the
Moscow Highest Technical School
}  1946: head of the Kiev Electrotechnical Institute of the
Ukraine Academy of Sciences
} 
The MESM
“Small Electronic Computing
Machine”
} 
} 
} 
1951: USSR’s first electronic computer
6,000 vacuum tubes
50 operations/second
BESM “Large Electronic Computing
Machine” (1953)
Opening up of cybernetics in the 1950s
} 
Lebedev’s success
} 
} 
} 
moved to Moscow
cybernetics laboratory
Lab produced computing products for the Russian
military and government in the 50s and 60s
Lebedev Institute for
Precision Mechanics
and Computing
Technology of the
Soviet Academy of
Sciences
Computers for state planning
} 
} 
Stalin’s death -> government decentralization
Khrushchev: created “regional councils”
} 
} 
Management bureaucracy tripled by 1963
1957 Soviet Academy of Sciences report:
} 
Computers as solution to promote efficiency
“Cybernetics in the Service of
Communism”
} 
Academy Council on Cybernetics, 1961
} 
Entire Soviet economy as one large system of feedback control
Mathematical economics took hold by early 1960s
}  500 institutions researching cybernetics by 1967, half of
them studying economics
} 
Rise and decline of Cybernetics
} 
1960s: cybernetics became one of four divisions of Soviet
science
} 
} 
} 
“The Science of Sciences”
1970s: decline of cybernetics
1980s: cybernetics gave way to informatics
Next time: The ARPANET
} 
Reading
} 
} 
} 
} 
Context
} 
} 
} 
Ornstein, Computing in the Middle Ages, Ch. 14 (2002)
Licklider, “Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic
Computer Network,” 1963
Computing (videos)
} 
} 
} 
} 
Lukasik, “Why the Arpanet was Built” (2011)
Computer, Chapter 11
“Packet switching,” Wikipedia (no log on this)
“Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing” (1972)
Vint Cerf on the history of packet switching
Len Kleinrock: The First Two Packets on the Internet
Primary sources
} 
} 
ARPA Computer Network – Request For Proposals
Request For Comments (RFC) #3 (2 pp)