The term cybernetics is much misused in the popular media. Often used to convey notions of high-technology, robotics, and even computer networks like the Internet, in reality, cybernetics refers to the study of communications and control in animal and machine.

Great mathematicians of the past such as Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) had been interested in the nature of computing machinery long before these machines had ever been realized. They concerned themselves with philosophizing over what special peculiarities might be present in machines that had the ability to compute. In the mid-1930s Alan Turing (1912–1954) developed the idea of an abstract machine (later to become known as the "Turing Machine"). Turing machines introduced the possibility of solving problems by mechanical processes that involved a machine stepping through a sequence of states under the guidance of a controlling element of some sort. This laid the...