W. Ross Ashby

1903–1972 · British psychiatrist

Topics: learning, complexity, science, artificial intelligence

• Variety can destroy variety.

  — W. Ross Ashby

• By a state of a system is meant any well-defined condition or property that can be recognised if it occurs again. Every system will naturally have many possible states.

  — W. Ross Ashby

• The fundamental questions in regulation and control can be answered only when we are able to consider the broader set of what it might do, when “might” is given some exact specification.

  — W. Ross Ashby

• Further, as every law of nature implies the existence of an invariant, it follows that every law of nature is a constraint.

  — W. Ross Ashby

• The most basic facts in biology are that this earth is now two thousand million years old, and that the biologist studies mostly that which exists today.

  — W. Ross Ashby

• Cybernetics treats not things but ways of behaving.

  — W. Ross Ashby

• Every isolated determinate dynamic system, obeying unchanging laws, will ultimately develop some sort of organisms that are adapted to their environments.

  — W. Ross Ashby

• If intellectual power is to be developed, we must somehow construct amplifiers for intelligence — devices that, supplied with a little intelligence, will emit a lot.

  — W. Ross Ashby