"The Chinese nation will not forget Qin's great cause, but it has to be said that the demise of Qin II is indeed a blessing for the Chinese people. Its experience and lessons are a huge asset for latecomers. Many people especially like to study the reasons for Qin's demise. It is like pulling a melon vine. The melon vine itself has no value, but just one pull can pull out a large string of watermelons. We are not learning history after all. What watermelons can we pull out this way?" 660 said longingly, and he believed that he could get some valuable knowledge in the following conversation.

015 After drinking a cup of tea, he said: "The melon vine is there. What kind of force do we use to pull, how long does it take, and how the direction of the pulling force will make us gain differently. Qin likes to control officials and enslave the people, so why not analyze Qin from the perspective of cybernetics?"

660 glanced at 015 with a surprised and admirable look: "This angle is indeed rare. Although I have also learned cybernetics, I have not studied the rise and fall of a dynasty from the perspective of cybernetics."

"Since that's the case, we should review cybernetics well."

The establishment of cybernetics is one of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century. Many new concepts and new technologies in modern society are closely related to cybernetics. The application scope of cybernetics covers the fields of engineering, biology, economy, society, population, etc., and has become a science to study common control laws in various systems.

From the 1930s to 1940s, scientists began to pay great attention to the research on information measurement and feedback mechanisms, and gained a deep understanding. British statistician R.A. Fisher raised the issue of information quantity based on classical statistical theory; American telecommunications engineer Shannon studied information quantity from communication engineering and proposed information entropy formula; Wiener studied the processing of noisy signals from the perspective of control, established Wiener filtering theory, and gave the essence of information concepts and proposed the information quantity measurement formula.

In 1932, American communications engineer H. Nyquist gave the stability condition of the negative feedback amplifier, namely the Nyquist stability criterion; in 1945, Wiener extended the concept of feedback to all control systems, abstracting feedback into a process of extracting part of information from the output of controlled objects as the next input and affecting the re-output. The reflection theory proposed by Soviet physiologist i.p. Pavlov confirmed that there are also information and feedback problems in living organisms. Based on research in automatic air defense artillery, Wiener found that the core issues of control and communication in animals and machines are information, information transmission and information processing.

In 1948, Wiener's foundational work "Cybernetics" was published, which became a symbol of the birth of cybernetics. Wiener took the subtitle of this book as "Science on Control and Communication in Animals and Machines", which provided a scientific definition for cybernetics under the current research status at that time. In this book, Wiener grasped the common characteristics of all communication and control systems containing information transmission and information processing; confirmed the basic nature of information and feedback in cybernetics, and pointed out that a communication system can always transmit information of various ideological contents according to people's needs, and an automatic control system must adjust its own movement according to changes in the surrounding environment; pointed out the statistical properties of cybernetics research, pointing out that the information received by the communication and control system has a certain random nature and meets a certain statistical distribution. The structure of the communication and control system itself must also adapt to this statistical nature and produce statistically satisfactory actions for a type of statistically expected input.

In 1979, Chinese cybernetic scientists Song Jian and others founded population cybernetics, using cybernetics ideas and methods to solve medium- and long-term forecasts and optimal controls for population development trends, and achieved success in the social practice of population control in China. (Excerpted from "Baidu Encyclopedia")
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