W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive. Ross Ashby was one of the original members of the Ratio Club, a small informal dining club of young psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers who met to discuss issues in cybernetics. The club was founded in 1949 by the neurologist John Bates and continued to meet until 1958. The title of his book "An Introduction to Cybernetics" popularised the usage of the term 'cybernetics' to refer to self-regulating systems, originally coined by Norbert Wiener in "". The book dealt primarily with homeostatic processes within living organisms, rather than in an engineering or electronic context. Earlier, in 1946, Alan
Complex system or communities. Complex systems may have the following features: Although it is arguable that humans have been studying complex systems for thousands of years, the modern scientific study of complex systems is relatively young in comparison to established fields of science such as physics and chemistry. The history of the scientific study of these systems follows several different research trends. In the area of mathematics, arguably the largest contribution to the study of complex systems was the discovery of chaos in deterministic systems, a feature of certain dynamical systems that is strongly related to nonlinearity. The study of neural networks