Cybernetics is the study of the communication and control processes of both living and artificial systems in order to understand the similarities and the differences between the two. The behavior of living nervous systems has been studied by biologists and cyberneticists in detail, and efforts to develop equivalent electronic systems have been based on these studies.

The term cybernetics is derived from the ancient Greek word for the craft of steering ships, kybernetikos. Two of the main branches of cybernetics are artificial intelligence and robotics. The American mathematician and social philosopher Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), generally considered the founder of modern cybernetics, first applied the word in 1948 to the theory of control mechanisms in his book Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Wiener explicitly related cybernetics to both the theory of automatic control and to the physiology of the nervous system. The birth of...