Poletaev Igor Andreevich. The history of information technology in the USSR and Russia. Igor Andreevich Poletaev
PREFACE BY THE PUBLISHER
Poletaevsky's "Signal" is a special book ... Its appearance in 1958 became a milestone on the thorny path of Russian cybernetics. In a strange way, the XX century was marked not only by great scientific achievements, but also by the shameful persecution of Knowledge and scientists. The "monkey" process in the USA, the arization of sciences in Germany, the persecution of biology, the theory of relativity and cybernetics in the USSR ... The irrationality of these phenomena in our country was emphasized by the fact that the "seditious" directions - from radiobiology to systems engineering - were still intensively developed for the sake of ensuring defense capability. As a result, the most legal and open to attack link, namely education, suffered the most from retrogrades. The "thaw" in education began with the publication of new teaching aidswritten by active scientists. One of these manuals was the "Signal". It is characteristic that the book by Igor Andreevich Poletaev was published in "Soviet Radio" - after all, the audience of this particular publishing house - a huge army of radio amateurs - was especially receptive to new ideas.
If this book had only historical interest, it would hardly be worth reprinting. It has been unconditionally preserved, at least in large libraries, and is available to specialists. The fact is that information theory and control theory ended up in street children, and their foundations fell out of school curricula in physics and natural science. As for computer science, this course is focused almost exclusively on either teaching popular algorithmic languages \u200b\u200band programming elements, or mastering current versions of operating systems and applications. A brilliantly written book by I.A. Poletaeva is certainly capable of filling the gap that has formed and helping young people to gain first-hand good knowledge of the most common problems of handling information and managing complex systems.
This publication was prepared by students of the Moscow gymnasium No. 1543 Alexei Alekseev, Vladimir Marchenko, Ruslan Sarkisyan and Mikhail Stepanov with the kind assistance of Andrey Igorevich Poletaev.
Foreword
Chapter 1. Energy and Cybernetics 9
Energy flow control 11
Information 22
Chapter 2. Signal 25
Isomorphism 28
Signal generation and response 34
Signals generate signals 36
Completeness of description 37
Discrete and continuous signals 40
Chapter. 3. Case 44
Random events 44
Probability 47
Probability distribution. Expectation and variance 53
Noise 58
Probability in physics. Entropy 62
Chapter 4. Amount of information 70
Information capacity 70
Measure of the amount of information 75
Code 80
Transfer rate 84
Self-correcting codes 89
Shannon's Theorem 92
Informational and physical entropy. Organization 94
Chapter 5. Signal Transmission 102
Modulation 103
Distortion 110
Spectrum and bandwidth 113
Breeding 116
Example of communication channel 119
Nerve fiber function 124
Chapter 6. Feedback. Regulation 128
Operation of control systems 137
Feedback in living organisms 141
Reflexes 150
Chapter 7. Signal in the car 162
Continuous computing devices 164
Discrete Account 169
Computing devices for discrete counting 172
Counting and analytical machines 176
High-speed electronic computers 180
Management and memory 193
Features of Electronic Machines 203
Theoretical logic and algebra of relay circuits 206
Relay Diagrams 212
Machines and Thinking 218
Chapter 8. Robot 221
Cyber \u200b\u200btoys 233
Robots and language 245
Automatic translation 258
Other robots 267
Chapter 9. Thought 275
The man in the car 277
Structure nervous system 233
Brain Function 293
Emotions 307
Signaling processes in the brain 309
What does the machine not possess? 315
Chapter 10. The Game 331
Game Theory Concepts 333
Strategy 334
Use function 336
Mixed Game Expansion 342
Random Moves 347
Strategy Game Machines 350
Once Again About Uncertain Games 354
Chapter 11. Robot "that could be smarter than its designer 360
Self-organizing systems 362
Implementing Self-Organizing Systems 367
Organization Redundancy 376
Chapter 12. Big Robot 380
What's next? 380
Cybernetic Systems Capabilities 385
Conclusion 395
Bibliography 401
To find out, understand and embrace the harmony of a scientific building with its unfinished parts means to receive such pleasure that only the highest beauty and truth can give.
D. I. MENDELEEV.
FOREWORD
Cybernetics * is the science of control processes and signal transmission in machines and living organisms, using mathematical methods.
* From the Greek root meaning “the art of steering”.
A signal, i.e. a physical process, information carrier, is the central concept of cybernetics, hence the title of this book.
The emergence, transmission and use of a signal for control is a phenomenon very common for the most, at first glance, different objects. The patterns of using a signal in control and communication systems are extensive, diverse and different from the laws of energy conversion. This specificity needs a separate study and a separate interpretation, rather general and strict.
The purpose of this book is not to provide exhaustive, precise and final definitions of the concepts of cybernetics and to present solutions to all problems. This task is hardly feasible today. The purpose of this book is only to provide the reader with a preliminary, as understandable as possible, presentation of the general ideas on which the doctrine of information and control is based. The great interest in cybernetics seems to justify such an attempt. General acquaintance with the whole range of ideas of cybernetics in general usually arouses great interest and helps in-depth study any one of its sections.
The wide field of applications of cybernetics - from communication theory to reflexology - creates great difficulties for those trying to cover the material as a whole. However most of the value of the concepts of cybernetics lies in the fact that they allow one to see the common in the most diverse phenomena and mutually enrich the most seemingly distant fields of knowledge. Therefore, limiting ourselves to considering any particular applications of cybernetics is detrimental to the presentation. Recognizing such a depletion of content undesirable and being convinced that the danger of making minor mistakes in details is a lesser evil than discarding entire areas of application of cybernetics, the author was naturally forced to enter those areas of knowledge that are far from his usual narrow specialty ... Of course, it was difficult to achieve an exhaustive completeness of the presentation for many reasons. Much can and perhaps needs to be added to the content of the book.
The presentation of the concepts of cybernetics in this book is mainly aimed at arousing interest in specific problems and drawing attention to them. It seems to us that a biologist and a doctor will see in a new way the living material with which they work, having received a general idea of \u200b\u200binformation, communication and control in their technical applications, and the engineer will be able to see new perspectives by comparing the systems he creates with natural systems. for a similar purpose.
The presentation of the concepts of cybernetics in a generally accessible form and without great simplifications is not an easy task. Undertaking its implementation, one often has to sacrifice the entertaining side of the presentation, hoping that the content of the very concepts of cybernetics will not allow the reader to get bored.
Cybernetics has not yet turned ten years since the day of its, if not its birth, then of its "baptism" *
* The word "cybernetics" has come into use since 1948 after the publication of N. Wiener's book under this title. For the first time the word "cybernetics" was used by the French physicist André Marie Ampere to refer to the science of public administration.
The number of problems of both a fundamentally cognitive and utilitarian-applied nature in the field of cybernetics is truly enormous, and most of them await early resolution. Therefore, the task of directing the efforts of scientists and technicians to solving these pressing problems, creating a unified understanding of the general laws of control systems and communication systems, establishing a common system of concepts and terms for various branches of knowledge is an extremely urgent task. If this book serves even the smallest extent to attract attention various professionals to their common interests, its task can be considered completed.
We are witnessing the first steps of cybernetics. The possibilities that it promises in the future are so great that the wildest imagination may be powerless to imagine them.
The presentation in this book does not copy any source or series of sources, although general ideas are drawn from many works.
Cybernetics developed for the first time in the USA, France and England. The first steps of cybernetics in the USSR were overshadowed by a misunderstanding of prejudice against it. Fortunately, the misunderstanding has now been dispelled, and cybernetics is deservedly gaining more and more attention of the Soviet intelligentsia. Today it is no longer possible to indiscriminately groan cybernetics; there remained only disputes of a fundamental nature, natural and necessary at all stages of the development of science.
There are many controversial and unresolved issues in cybernetics. This makes it especially interesting. This book deliberately avoids controversial issues. It is impossible to make indisputable statements regarding future, not yet created devices, unresolved issues. A broad and free discussion of problems in scientific disputes is useful for the development of science and instructive for the participants in these disputes. Therefore, the author is grateful in advance to everyone who will undertake the labor of conscientious and well-reasoned criticism. This, of course, is about a scientific discussion of the issue, and not about declarations from biased positions, which were abundant in the first messages about cybernetics in our country.
Of the negative judgments about cybernetics, I would like to note one thing. Sometimes workers of narrow applied specialties related to cybernetics ask the question: “Why call“ cybernetics ”something that has existed for many years without this name and what we do with success every day? It won't help us in anything! " I would not like to sharply object to such judgments. You can work as a fireman for many years and have no idea about energy in general. You can speak in prose all your life and not suspect about it, without the slightest harm to yourself. In exactly the same way, one can do, for example, tracking systems from day to day, not to think about the connections between the concepts of technology and biology. And no one will have the right to say that such activity within one narrow specialty is not useful. But if we were only engaged in activities within the "narrow specialties", without going beyond them, then we would not have jet planes, or tagged atoms, or, perhaps, atomic energy, in a word, nothing that was created by a bold idea, breaking the framework of "narrow specialties". Sometimes the courageous unification of dissimilar phenomena by common concepts brings immeasurably more social benefit than movement along the beaten path.
The author considers it his pleasant duty to express his deep gratitude to everyone who helped him in writing this book with advice, instructions and discussion of breast issues, and first of all to Academician A.I.Berg, without whose initiative this book would not have seen the light, and so on. t. A. A. Lyapunov, A. I. Kitov, L. V. Krushinsky, M. O. Herzberg and many others.
Moscow, 1956
CHAPTER 1
ENERGY AND CYBERNETICS
It is impossible to imagine modern culture without using huge amounts of energy from natural sources. No branch of the modern industry is complete without energy devices of significant power. We consume huge amounts of energy when melting pig iron in blast furnaces or steel in open-hearth furnaces, squeezing multi-ton billets in rolling mills, removing shavings from millions of metal parts on metal-working machines, lifting and transferring construction materials on construction sites, moving millions of tons of soil in the construction of hydraulic structures, transporting loads and passengers from one end of the country to the other by land, water and air, performing agricultural work. The energy, splitting into small portions, penetrates into our homes, illuminates, warms them, allows us to do small household chores without the cost of physical labor. The energy converted by machines from one type to another obediently serves not only our material needs, but also helps to satisfy spiritual needs. The modern printing industry, telephone, telegraph, radio, television, cinema could not exist without the skillful use of large amounts of energy. Try to imagine how the life of a modern city would change if all energy sources were turned off and we would have to do only with the power of our own muscles, and it will become clear to you how closely and firmly the life of modern society is connected with the use of energy.
Various and numerous applications of energy for the benefit of man are the result of many years of development of various branches of science and technology, which are united by the common name of energy. Electrical engineering, hydro- and aerodynamics, thermodynamics, nuclear physics and many other branches of science and technology are integral parts of energy.
Basic knowledge in the field of energy was already established in the nineteenth century. The discovery of the basic laws of energy transformation - the first and second laws of thermodynamics - made it possible to approach strictly, with a number and measure, to the design of energy machines.
The first law, the law of conservation of energy, says: the emergence or destruction of energy is impossible. This law establishes the equivalence of various types of energy during its transformation. One kilowatt hour of electricity can turn into 367,100 kilograms of mechanical work, no more and no less. However, usually it is not possible to fully use the entire amount of energy involved in the transformation. During the operation of the machine, part of the energy is wasted, but it does not disappear, but goes into such types of energy (most often in heat) that can no longer be completely "collected" and used. It is possible to use only part of the energy involved in the transformation. This part (usually expressed as a percentage) is called the efficiency of the energy conversion machine. One of the consequences of the law of conservation of energy is the following statement: "The efficiency (efficiency) of a machine cannot be more than 100%." In practice, it is always less than 100%.
Specific energy conversion industries have a major focus on improving efficiency. Much remains to be done in this regard. So, for example, the efficiency of a steam locomotive usually does not exceed a few percent, and of all the energy obtained from burning coal in the furnace, only less than one tenth is spent on moving the train, and the remaining nine tenths are uselessly spent on heating the surrounding air.
The energy expended in heating the air can usually no longer be reused or, if possible, only partially. If two reservoirs of heat have the same temperature, then although they have stored a large amount of energy, it cannot be used without the help of a reservoir with a higher or lower temperature. This statement is one of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law can be formulated as follows: a process is impossible, the only result of which would be the conversion of heat into work.
The first and second laws make it possible to set reasonable requirements for energy systems and show what can and cannot be demanded of them.
True, to this day there are still unfortunate perpetual motion machines who try to get around either the first or the second law and get energy from sources from which it cannot be extracted. Attempts to "invent" perpetual motion machines are useless.
The energy industry has not yet said its last word and continues to develop steadily and rapidly. Suffice it to recall that a new chapter in the energy sector has now begun - the use of atomic energy. Only the first steps have been taken along this path, and at present it is still difficult to predict how much the use of atomic energy will change the face of energy. It is only clear that these changes will be significant and that, as a result, their "muscles" of humanity will become even more powerful than they are today.
Energy flow control
Any application or use of energy requires control of its flow. Any energy machine must be started up and stopped, and its work must be regulated. Any technological process requires a change in the amount of supplied energy over time.
The most important thing in the process of controlling the flow of energy is that to carry out the control, always less energy is needed than that which is being controlled. If this were not the case, then control would be impossible. Any control device has in its composition a "valve" that opens or closes the path for a large amount of energy and which requires relatively little effort for its "actuation". Such "valves" are vacuum tubes, relays, contactors, switches, throttle valves of internal combustion engines, spools of a steam engine, water taps, etc. All devices of this kind can be considered as amplifiers that receive a weak effect on the "input" and give at the "output" a corresponding action of great force, for which energy is drawn from an outside source. The effort that is applied to the control levers of the locomotive's steam engine is commensurate with the strength of a person's muscles, and a person standing by the machine, with the movement of his hands, controls energy that many times exceeds his own energy resources.
Initially, at the dawn of power engineering, only a human driver stood at the control arms of the machine. In Newcomen's "atmospheric machine", even the control of the spool for admitting steam into the cylinder at each stroke of the piston was carried out by the driver, and the speed of the machine, therefore, depended on his agility. According to legend, the boy-driver Humphrey Potter made the machine pull the handle of the spool at the right moment, tying the handle with a string to the connecting rod of the machine. This was one of the first applications of feedback in a machine, which has survived in principle to this day and which will probably continue to exist for a long time to come. The resourceful and lazy boy handed over his responsibilities for regulating the steam intake to the machine itself, and he unloaded this not only with his hands, but - which is fundamentally much more important - his attention.
The James Watt regulator, often cited as a classic example of a regulator, belongs to the same class of devices that replace human activity when performing one operation. In this case, this operation consists in keeping the machine speed constant by adjusting the steam supply when the load changes. The regulator removes a small part of the machine's energy and directs it to actuation of the control valve - damper. This small amount of energy is sufficient to drive the machine because the damper, like other "valve" type devices, has the "amplification" property. The energy diverted for regulation carries "information" about changes in the course of the machine. The regulator uses this information in order to regulate the stroke by acting on the damper. In essence, the person who transferred his functions to the regulator did the same.
And now a person continues to control the machine directly, being in the booth of a crane operator or excavator, sitting behind the wheel of a car or tractor, holding the steering wheel of a ship or the handle of an electric train controller. However, since the days of Watt and Newcomen, machines have become so "smarter" that some of them can do without human assistance. A person, in those cases when he is present, performs only operations that for some reason are not yet automated. The machine "itself" takes preventive measures against the harmful consequences of inattention and human error.
A decisive role in the development of automatic control technology for power devices was played by the emergence of electronics - the technology of using devices that use the properties of electronic and ionic currents in vacuum and semiconductors, as well as the achievements of communication technology. The development of fast, reliable amplifiers and relays has created tremendous opportunities for automatic and remote control.
When we dial a phone number using a dial, we get a connection with the desired subscriber - one of several tens or hundreds of thousands, and not a single person is directly involved in the implementation of the connection. Rotating the dial under our fingers quickly and reliably controls the working telephone finders on the PBX located several kilometers from our apartment.
The refrigerator standing in your room monitors the constancy of the temperature of its cabinet itself, preventing either heating or hypothermia of its contents. It is automatically controlled.
Complex messages, orders, instructions are transmitted by telephone, telegraph, radio. These orders govern the actions of the executing people. Drawings, drawings, photographs are transmitted by phototelegraph. Even more complex messages are transmitted through the television system, bringing to the viewer a moving image, gray or color, simultaneously with sound.
Remote messaging, remote control, automatic control - all these branches of technology have grown in the bowels of the energy sector, based on its technical achievements and to serve its needs. However, it is clear that control is not limited to energy transformations alone; it has specific features that deserve a separate study.
The need for automatic machines and remote control especially increased and became an urgent need when a new branch of energy was born - the use of nuclear energy. It is known that direct contact of a person with radioactive drugs causes burns, radiation sickness and death. Only very small portions of radiant energy are carried by living organisms without harm. Therefore, the control of nuclear reactions, the processes of manufacturing and research of radioactive preparations cannot be carried out by human hands and under his direct supervision.
Fortunately, by the time nuclear power appeared, human hands were already “long enough” and eyes “farsighted” enough to cope with new tasks. The technology of automatic and remote control appeared before nuclear reactors. Large and small electric power stations, fully automatically controlled, have been operating more than two decades ago. At such stations, all operations to regulate the voltage in the network when the load changes, emergency protection, switching units, regulating their operating mode, in a word, all current maintenance operations are performed automatically. Only in the event of a deep fault is the engineer on duty called up by an automatically active alarm. The same station, but with manual control, requires continuous attention and efforts of more than a dozen workers for its maintenance.
Automatic meteorological radio stations are dropped from an aircraft by parachute, themselves (with the help of an automatic machine) are set in a working vertical position, put into operation and for a long time regularly transmit the results of meteorological observations by radio.
Obviously, a certain and, moreover, not too narrow range of human responsibilities, associated with the use of not muscular strength, but attention and ingenuity, is fully performed without his presence by automatic control devices. Before our eyes, machines "take away" more and more responsibilities for energy management from humans. Actually, the very concept of "machine" has bifurcated. We call both the internal combustion engine and the electronic calculating machine a machine. For the avoidance of confusion, we will call "energy machines" machines like an internal combustion engine or steam, which convert one type of energy into another. As for calculating machines and control systems, we will give them a different name later.
The advent of high-speed electronic digital machines, or - as they are also called - discrete counting machines, sharply intensified the "offensive" of machines on the field of intellectual human activity, or, more simply, made it possible to dramatically complicate the control operations entrusted to machines. Suffice it to say that automatic devices of this type have proven in practice their ability not only to replace the labor of many tens and
hundreds of technicians - calculators, but even perform in an amazing way such seemingly inherently human duties, such as translating a text from one language to another, for example, from English into Russian. A few years ago, the assumption of the possibility of entrusting translation to a machine would have seemed to many to be the fruit of a sick fantasy.
If the machine and the person begin to compete in the performance of any one operation, which is a more or less complex reaction to a change in the external environment, then the first place will certainly remain with the machine. A machine works many times faster and more reliably than a human, it is not subject to fatigue, is not distracted, and other human weaknesses are not characteristic of it.
A person called upon to perform one single operation, for example, driving a car on a flat road free of obstacles, works like an automaton. His work is the better, the more accurate, timely and automatic his reactions. Any distraction, any "exit from the automatic mode" is fraught with unpleasant consequences for him and the passengers. Its work can be accurately described in the same terms as the work of an automaton.
But the weakness of a person who is called upon to give all his attention to fulfilling the role of an automaton, the weakness that he can switch his attention to something else - to be distracted, it is also his main strength, which no machine can boast of. A person can perform the functions of any automaton, rearranging from one task to another and learning to do each task in the best possible way: to lead any crew in any conditions, monitor the progress of the production process, calculate, invent, etc. In addition, he can choose which of the tasks he needs to solve at the moment, formulate this task and find methods for solving it. And although there are already many automata, each of which solves one of the problems usually solved by a person, and the number of types of such automata is constantly growing, until now there is still no one that would solve them in all. However, we cannot give convincing arguments , which would refute the possibility of the existence of such an automaton.
In the body of animals, including humans, a large number of processes continuously occur, which are quite similar to the work of technical automata, although they occur in a completely different physical environment and include the work of living tissues and cells, which by their nature are completely different from relays , radio tubes, lever, steam flow. Nevertheless, the regulation of the energy process of heating and cooling and the maintenance of a constant body temperature of warm-blooded animals is, in principle, quite similar to regulation of the temperature in a thermostat. This similarity can be traced even in detail.
It is pertinent, however, to ask, is it not a gross mistake to make comparisons between living organisms and mechanisms? Are we not falling into "vulgar mechanism" in this case? Apparently, such comparisons can be made, especially since they have been and are being carried out for a long time. We have been studying the chemical transformations of substances in the tissues of living organisms for a long time and we repeat many reactions in a test tube. We study the exchange of energy in the body, calculate the calorific value of food absorbed by the body, we study the mechanisms of levers formed by the bones of the skeleton and skeletal muscles, moreover, we also interfere in the mechanics and chemistry of the body, correcting its shortcomings based on the knowledge of mechanics, physics and chemistry , we undertake surgical and medical treatment and at the same time do not ask any questions about “vulgar mechanism” or “vulgar chemistry”. If other laws of nature, the laws of control by means of signals, turn out to be equally applicable to both living and dead matter, then hardly anything, except, perhaps, prejudices, can prohibit the consideration and use of these laws. There was a time when, due to the same prejudices, autopsies were strictly prohibited. True, it was a long time ago. Today we can and should consider facts without prejudice, clearly establishing both the similarities and differences in natural phenomena.
Automatisms are observed not only in the activity of internal organs, but also in the behavior of animals. These are the so-called "reflected movements", or reflexes that appear with "machine" regularity and are always the same with the same stimuli. By their changes, they judge about deviations from the norm in the body. This means that not only the activity of the internal organs of the animal's body, but also its behavior, can, of course, be placed with due caution, s on a par with the operation of technical automatic devices, and we can consider them, at least in part, from a unified point of view, using general methodology, the same evaluation criteria, etc.
There is no doubt that the generalization of information and methods of both technical and biological sciences on the basis of a rigorous mathematical approach will lead to the mutual enrichment of the natural sciences. Therefore, a unification of points of view should be considered highly desirable.
But is this really possible? Isn't living nature deeply qualitatively different from inanimate? Isn't there an impenetrable wall between them, which will not allow the establishment of common views and methods? And is it possible to reduce all the behavior of animals, their adaptation to environmental conditions to automatisms, even if very complex?
I.M.Sechenov answered this question in the affirmative. He wrote in his work "Reflexes of the Brain": "... the question of the complete dependence of the most voluntary of arbitrary actions on the external conditions of a person has been resolved in the affirmative. From this it follows, in a fatal way, that under the same internal and external conditions of man, his activity must be the same. The choice between many ends of the same psychic reflex, therefore, is positively impossible, and the apparent possibility is only a deception of consciousness ... "
IP Pavlov shared this opinion. He wrote: “... Man is, of course, a system (more roughly speaking - a machine), like any other in nature, subject to laws inevitable and uniform for all of nature, but the system, in the horizon of our modern scientific vision, is the only one in the highest self-regulation ... We already know a lot about self-adjusting machines between the products of human hands. From this point of view, the method of studying a system - a person is the same as for any other system: decomposition into parts, the study of the meaning of each part, the study of the connection between the parts, the study of relationships with the environment and, in the end, understanding, on the basis of all this, its general work and its management, if it is in the means of a person ... ".
As for the differences and similarities between animate and inanimate nature in general and the possibility of "explaining" all phenomena from a different point of view, some general considerations can be made about this, although many aspects of the processes occurring in living organisms are still not entirely clear to us.
Anything physical body large (or, as they say, a macroscopic body) consists of molecules (or microscopic particles), it does not matter whether this body belongs to living or dead nature. All properties of macroscopic bodies are ultimately determined by the properties of microparticles and the nature of their interaction. However, for living organisms, this dependence appears, apparently, in a different way than for bodies of dead nature.
Every molecule is a stable formation. It does not change its structure or state until it is influenced from the outside with a sufficiently high energy (thermal collision with another molecule, collision with an elementary particle, field action).
Molecules, collected in large quantities, form a physical body with new properties that a single molecule did not have. The molecules that make up the body constantly exchange energy, exchange the amount of movement, and mutually move. Changes take place in the body, even in the absence of external influences: the temperature of its parts is leveled, concentration is leveled various substances in the volume of the body, etc. As a result, the body comes to a certain state of equilibrium. Physicists say: "Friction, diffusion, thermal conductivity bring a microscopic system through thermodynamically irreversible processes into a state with the highest entropy in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics." In this state of equilibrium, microparticles - the molecules that make up the body, move, exchange places, transfer energy, but at the same time, on average, the same movements occur in any direction. Therefore, macroscopically, i.e. on the scale of the whole body, neither energy transfer nor concentration changes occur. This is the essence of the equilibrium state or the state with the "highest entropy".
Living organisms, unlike bodies of inanimate nature, being left to themselves, do not come to a state of equilibrium. Numerous and varied physical and chemical processes are continuously going on in them.
The process of "increasing entropy", ie, equalizing the temperature with the surrounding bodies and disintegration of stable structures, begins only after the death of the organism. This does not mean, however, that the second law of thermodynamics is invalid for living organisms. They maintain the constancy of their structure by absorbing and decomposing food and by absorbing energy from the outside. If we consider, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, a "closed system", that is, a system completely disconnected from the rest of the world, consisting of an organism, food and waste, then an increase in entropy will be observed in this system. However, the entropy of the living body itself remains approximately unchanged until the moment of death.
The difference in the properties of living and nonliving bodies, noted by us above, is determined by the fact that physicochemical processes take place in a living organism as a whole and in every living cell, the direction and course of which is final! ultimately determined by the molecular structures of the cell nucleus. In a living cell, macroscopic processes are continuously controlled by microscopic objects. In this case, the stability, invariability, characteristic of molecules as objects of the microcosm, manifests itself in the form of invariability of structures and constancy of the processes of the organism on a macroscopic scale. The mediator is the control processes in the living cell.
More and more details of these management processes are gradually becoming clear. It is possible that the coming years brought us the knowledge of new interesting details, and maybe the solution to the "mystery of life", a solution obtained by studying the processes of control and transmission of information in a living cell. After all, it is these processes that make the cell alive, stable, steadily and uniformly functioning in environment until the moment of death.
Regardless of the decision of the question of whether there is an impassable wall between the living and the inanimate world and whether it is possible to reduce all the behavior of living beings to complex automatisms, we can assert that today we know a large number of examples when a machine successfully performs complex operations of an intellectual nature, replacing of a person in the operations of controlling energy devices. This circumstance gave rise to a general system of views on the processes of communication and control, which includes the concept of information.
For all systems in which control processes take place, be it control devices or living organisms, one very common feature is characteristic: individual parts of these systems are connected with each other in such a way that they transmit to each other some messages about the processes taking place in them, with using signals. It is on this basis that one can trace the deep similarity and unity of management processes. The energy processes accompanying the signaling play a secondary and unprincipled role. It is not the energy that matters, but the signal. To show by an example the validity of the last remark, let us ask ourselves the question: what is the efficiency of a television or radar? It is impossible to answer this question (as, incidentally, to any incorrectly posed question), already because the output of a television, radar and similar systems, as such, the energy as such is of no interest. The purpose of the radar is not to release energy in one form or another, as is characteristic of an energy machine, but to solve a completely different problem. Both radar and television consume energy, and even in significant quantities, but they do not give energy, but information, information in the form of signals.
The concept of information is very broad. Information is carried by the telegraph, telephone and radio. The information is recorded on gramophone records, magnetic tapes, photographs and lithographic prints. Information is transmitted using the human language orally or in writing, it is sent by mail, published in the form of books, newspapers and magazines, stored in libraries. Information is contained in the reading of the measuring device, in the results of product control, in numerical calculations, in mathematical formulas and tables. Our sight, hearing, touch bring us information about external events, internal organs exchange information, coordinating their joint work. Trace amounts of chemicals provide us with information about the quality of food through our sense of smell and taste. Changes in physical quantities (electric voltage and current, electromagnetic field, pressure), mechanical movements introduce information into automatic devices and allow new information to be obtained from them.
Information is something that bears a trace of some fact or event, an event that has already happened or should happen, everything that delivers information or messages about this fact to us. Creation, transmission, storage, use and mainly transformation of information occurs both in machines and in living organisms according to certain strict laws. The rules by which information is converted are called conversion algorithms *.
* An example of an algorithm can be any mathematical Formula.
The laws of existence and transformation of information are objective and accessible to study. They are being studied intensively. Actually, the definition of these laws, their precise description, the use of information transformation algorithms, especially control algorithms, is the content of cybernetics.
It is pertinent to note here that the precise definition of the content and boundaries of such sciences as cybernetics is difficult, and therefore the discussion around them is still ongoing. An exact definition of the boundaries of any science can usually be given only after this science is fully formed. The same cannot be said about the very young cybernetics.
Cybernetics grew out of the study of specific signal transmission processes, control processes and the generalization of the laws by which these processes proceed. With the accumulation and generalization of facts, naturally, the scope of application of the already studied laws expands. The abundance of applications of cybernetics sometimes forces one to ask the question: what is not related to cybernetics? Such questions are caused, of course, only by the novelty of the situation, since a similar question in relation to, for example, mathematics would never occur to anyone to ask, although mathematics has no less fields of application than cybernetics.
Specialists in certain applied sciences sometimes identify cybernetics with their specialty. For example, one often hears that cybernetics is a theory of automatic control (of course, it is highly expanded). Some, carried away by the most spectacular perspectives, argue that cybernetics is the science of modeling the functions of the human brain. Such definitions are very limited.
It is unlikely that attempts to give an accurate and rigorous definition of cybernetics, which would be correct once and for all, can now be fruitful. However, the dividing line between cybernetics and “non-cybernetics” is always easy to draw, if we remember that the interests of cybernetics lie in the field of general laws of information transfer, its transformation and use for control.
We can say that one of the main tasks of cybernetics is the search for strictly formalized algorithms for transforming information and the implementation of these algorithms.
Systems and devices dealing with signals, perceiving, transforming, transmitting, receiving, storing, processing or using information and operating in accordance with a certain algorithm, we will call cybernetic systems or devices.
Thus, an electronic calculating machine is a cybernetic machine, in contrast to a steam machine - an energy machine.
Energy and cybernetic systems most often exist and work together. An automatic power substation, an unmanned aircraft, an auto-regulated manufacturing process are examples of this. The living organism also combines the energy and cybernetic systems.
Energy and cybernetics go hand in hand. And just as energy cannot be used without its control, so control cannot be carried out apart from the material, physical process, without energy, even in the smallest quantities.
However, the specificity and patterns of these two areas of natural phenomena are different, and this difference must be very clearly seen. The concept of information was developed later than the concept of energy. And the laws of operation of cybernetic systems are still far from being sufficiently understood. Today, the foundations of their understanding are only being laid.
The wide field of already existing applications and the truly immense prospects for the development of cybernetics require rapid progress in the knowledge of the laws of cybernetics and their use.
One of the basic concepts of cybernetics is the concept of a signal. We will proceed to the analysis of this concept.
COUNT OF CHAPTER AND FRAGMEHTA BOOK
In the photo Igor Andreevich Poletaev
Since 1961 I.A. Poletaev headed a laboratory at the Institute of Mathematics of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences.
He was an outstanding person, and I consider it necessary to bring memories of him. The name of this person, of course, should remain in the memory of generations.
He was one of many people who formed the unique spirit of Academgorodok that I am trying to convey. This spirit was not created by one person. There were many people in Akademgorodok different ages, but among the youth there were also such pillars as Poletaev.
Igor Andreevich Poletaev was born in Moscow in 1915. In 1938 he graduated with honors from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute; in accordance with the diploma issued to him, he signed many of his publications: "Engineer Poletaev".
His first scientific works were devoted to gas discharge plasma. They are performed at a very high level and published in the Reports and Physical Journals of the Academy of Sciences.
I.A. Poletaev fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. He was a platoon commander, battery commander, division engineer. Was injured.
After the war, working in a military research institute, I.A. Poletaev did the same thing that his American colleagues did: he summed up the scientific results of the past war. Analysis of the experience of this war led Norbert Wiener to the creation of a new science of management --- cybernetics.
To many ideas of this science I.A. Poletaev came on his own. Therefore, it is quite understandable that after removing the ideological curse from the term "cybernetics", he became an enthusiast and ardent propagandist of this science.
Soviet cybernetics "left" during the Khrushchev Thaw from the seminar of Alexei Andreyevich Lyapunov at Moscow State University, where mathematicians, physicists, biologists, military men and economists met. Active participants of the seminar were A.P. Ershov and I.A. Poletaev.
The polished, brilliant, witty speeches of Poletaev at this seminar formed the basis of his book "Signal", published in 1958. It played an outstanding role in the dissemination of cybernetic ideas in the USSR, aroused great interest abroad, and was translated into a number of European and Japanese languages.
Igor Andreevich's talent was clearly manifested in his scientific work of the Siberian period. He found important problems related to management in nature and society, and after careful, painstaking study, he gave them an exhaustive, brilliant, long-lasting solution.
For those who know a little about these issues, I will give a couple of examples.
Using Leontief-type models, Poletaev came to the conclusion that in order to win an armed conflict, resources must first be invested in reproduction and only at the final stage a sufficient part of the accumulated resources should be devoted to military purposes.
Poletaev developed the principle of limiting factors formulated by him, which he called the Liebig principle. Using this principle, he gave simple explanations for a number of biological phenomena, such as the Schmalhausen growth formula, for some features of the behavior of the "predator-prey" system, which were not taken into account by the Volterra model. One of the models explained why trees don't grow to the sky.
Igor Andreevich's favorite thing was the exposure of psychics, telepaths and magicians. In our time of the heyday of magicians and healers, the vacancy of such an exposer is empty.
Poletaev was a polymath. He was fluent in three major European languages, read Polish and Italian, and made great strides in learning Japanese. He was a keen connoisseur of literature, music, painting.
He became famous throughout the country for writing an article that caused a stormy all-Union polemic, which proved the priority of "physicists" over "lyricists". When his opponents began to prove the importance of lyrics to such a connoisseur as I.A. Poletaev, they brought him true joy, falling into the trap he had set up.
One cannot but mention Poletaev's significant contribution to the development of mathematical modeling technology, which is now widely used. The teachers of today's computer scientists (the name "Informatics" replaced the first name "Cybernetics"; in the USA this science is called "Computer Science"), programmers, biologists are enthusiastic readers of his amazing book "Signal".
On the stone standing on the grave of I.A. Poletaeva in Akademgorodok, a modest inscription: “Engineer I.А. Poletaev. 1915-1983 ".
Reviews
The daily audience of the Proza.ru portal is about 100 thousand visitors, who in total view more than half a million pages according to the traffic counter, which is located to the right of this text. Each column contains two numbers: the number of views and the number of visitors.
Igor Poletaev: "My opinion is perpendicular to yours"
“... Disputes generally do not lead to the discovery or confirmation of the truth. It's just a way to express yourself and assert yourself. A hybrid of art and sports, a way to skip your own erudition and intellect or its ersatz before the eyes of an enthusiastic audience. I do not mean to say that arguments are generally useless. They are useful, but not for "truth" and its dissemination, but for the sake of testing the stability of their own argumentation. In a dispute, all the dirt that he himself would never have collected and invented will be poured on you for free. This is a great help, although it is expensive. What is called "mud" is actually a healing thing ... "
I. A. Poletaev
Igor Andreevich Poletaev, who owns the statement in the title, was one of the founders of cybernetics in our country. This science (and is it rather a methodology) is now preferred to be called informatics, thereby emphasizing the rejection of claims to the "theory of everything", which status was originally firmly stuck to cybernetics. In fact, as if not to throw out the child with water - "theory of everything" from cybernetics, of course, did not work out, but the idea of \u200b\u200bconvergence of various disciplines (sometimes very different - such as literary criticism and electronics) under the roof of a unified approach turned out to be quite fruitful. However, up to some limits - those in which a mathematical (and algorithmic) approach to describing the phenomena of reality is generally possible.
Igor Poletaev and the cover of his book
When they talk about the formation of cybernetics in the USSR, they usually remember Corr. A. A. Lyapunov, academicians A. I. Berg, V. M. Glushkov, S. L. Sobolev, as well as many other scientists, whom I will not list here, so as not to miss anyone undeservedly. Now it is difficult to imagine how popular these topics were then both among scientists and among engineers. Poletaev, among them, occupies a certain special place, which is very difficult to understand and evaluate in retrospect. Especially if you consider that the formal insignia - titles, degrees and positions - Igor Andreevich was by no means overwhelmed during his lifetime. But his influence on the Russian cybernetic school is difficult to overestimate: the whole point is that Poletaev was a brilliant polemicist, who grasped the essence of the problem before any interlocutor, was able to argue wittily, reasonably and profoundly. Because of these qualities, during the "thaw" in the 1960s, he was even invited to speak before the party elite and was allowed to freely scold the Soviet regime - however, in narrow circles.
How did it happen that this brilliant orator and highly educated person became the "engineer Poletaev", whom the whole country knew, as a morose technician obsessed with physics, who does not recognize poetry, who considers the entire humanitarian culture obsolete? But let's talk about everything in order.
Cybernetics
The biography of Igor Andreevich is not rich in external events, but a person who well represents the Soviet life of that era is striking in some nuances. Seven-year school (1930) - but with the teaching of three (!) Languages: German, French and English. At the same time - a music school, piano class. Difficult (after seven years) admission to the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, but even before that IA tried to enter ... the school of infantry commanders, while studying in a theatrical circle at his home plant "Dynamo". A rare combination of interests for any time. But nothing goes to waste - at the end of the war, in February 1945, an air defense division engineer, physicist and expert in foreign languages, Poletaev was sent to America as part of the so-called "Military Trade Delegation" to study radar technology. Poletaev there sat out the end of the war, the death of Roosevelt and returned at the end of 1945 - the recent allies quickly retrained themselves into potential enemies.
A connoisseur of American radar, Poletaev became a valuable asset, and ended up in the Research Institute of the Main Aviation Directorate. In the military department, he served for another decade and a half. At the same time he defended his thesis (in physics), but the circle of his interests was already different.
It is curious that Nobert Wiener, the author of the acclaimed Cybernetics (1948), also came to cybernetics from radar. Anti-aircraft fire control systems were a non-trivial mathematical problem, and an excellent model of any dynamic control processes in general. Having independently arrived at many of the principles of Wiener science, Poletaev became its ardent propagandist in our country.
Unfortunately, it turned out that cybernetics was substituted by political obscurantists (as we would now say - fundamentalists). The most successful and complete, as is known, was the defeat of biology. Having lost (including in the physical sense, as happened with N.I. Vavilov, who died in prison) of many world-renowned leaders, and the actual possibility of development, Russian biology has never recovered from this blow, despite the fact that the ban on the turn of the 1970s. The humanities (sociology, psychology) and economics in the USSR never enjoyed popularity among those in power, but here they were completely driven underground. Less well known are the corresponding actions in chemistry (the persecution of supporters of the theory of resonance, headed by Academician Y.K. Syrkin, whose lectures the author of these lines had a chance to listen to already in the 1970s) and about quantum mechanics. But it turned out to be a short time to get the physicists from the propagandists of the "only correct doctrine", due to their privileged status in ensuring the defense capability of the state. And in mathematics, there seemed to be nowhere to stick around - everything was somehow ... non-class.
But the daughter of mathematics, cybernetics, turned out to be "the very thing" - with her claims to the universality of management processes ... In the 1954 "Concise Philosophical Dictionary", it was defined as follows: " CYBERNETICS (from the other Greek word meaning helmsman, manager)– reactionary pseudoscience ...". The "propagandists" did not suspect that cybernetics has long and successfully developed not only on its own soil, but is also widely used in practice - in the military complex. By 1956, leading mathematicians and other scientists came to the conclusion that it was no longer possible to endure this, and in the wake of the 20th Congress, which exposed the personality cult of Stalin, they began by organizing the Institute of Cybernetics within the Academy of Sciences.
Igor Andreevich took an active part in all this activity. According to the memoirs of M.G. Gaaze-Rapoport (later - the most prominent cyberneticist, and then also a military expert on air defense systems), I.S. Brook, the designer of one of the first domestic computers M1, which we will recall, gave Poletaev to read in English. ... Even if this recollection is erroneous (the distribution of forbidden literature was punishable), Poletaev, in any case, had no problems getting acquainted with the original source - as a military specialist, he had access to the special storage. At the suggestion of Admiral-Academician A.I.Berg, Poletaev wrote the book "Signal" (1958) - the first domestic publicly available textbook outlining the basics of cybernetics ... Without dwelling on the enthusiastic reviews that leading experts still accompany this book, it is worth noting that all textbooks on this discipline, published decades later, exactly repeat the structure of Poletaev's book. And a separate note - it was written, in contrast to many similar, sometimes very good, textbooks and manuals, in intelligible Russian and is distinguished by the utmost clarity of presentation. Poletaev's style is also characterized by a reluctance to hide some controversial points, which were abound in cybernetics.
State and government
Although the main scientific works of Poletaev were works written in the 1960s on biological cybernetics and operations research, it is impossible to ignore the topic of the relationship between the science of cybernetics and the state of the "planned economy" (we now call it "command"). This topic is completely undeservedly bypassed by historians - perhaps because humanitarians have little understanding of the essence of purely scientific problems, which sometimes unexpectedly correlate with political ideas. Everyone has heard about the Chilean General Pinochet and his overthrow of the government of the socialist President Allende in a coup d'état in 1973. But few people know that one of the key moments of Allende's economic policy was an attempt to create a cybernetic model of the entire Chilean economy, with the participation of the great English scientist Stafford Beer. A naive attempt (there was one and a half computers in the whole country) and doomed to failure without Pinochet's interference, but still ...
The fact is that the ideas of a planned economy, by their very essence, ideally fit into the cybernetic concept. From a theoretical point of view, in cybernetics, already in the 1950s, everything was ready in order to build a global mathematical model of state governance, implement it "in hardware" and send the entire State Planning Commission to retire together with numerous ministries and central administrations.
We will not analyze here the global miscalculations of the supporters of this approach, which would still not allow such a system to function normally, even if it was created and adjusted (and the necessary costs, both initial and current, according to V.M. Glushkov, are comparable to nuclear and space project combined). Let us only note that at a time when it was believed that a machine translation program would actually work with a complexity of "several thousand machine instructions" (the statement of AI Kitov, also a military scientist, and one of the main initiators of the struggle for Soviet cybernetics), and a computer will be able to completely imitate a person, reaching the memory size of 10 10 bits (a little more than a gigabyte - so the great Turing believed), all later objections were, of course, still unknown. Equally, objections to the planned economy in general were not obvious at that time - at least in our country.
And, of course, it was worth trying - since managing the economy is voluntaristic, then here is God himself, as they say. ordered to use a computer. This is also supported by the fact that such systems for data analysis and decision-making, albeit not at such a global level, are being introduced more and more into modern practice. Especially in the field of corporate governance, and of course, where strict management is an inherent property of the system - in military affairs.
And in the USSR, at least three centers arose almost simultaneously, where proposals were put forward for state projects of automatic control systems. Two of them were civil - this is INEUM I.S. Brook, where the latter gathered under his wing disgraced economists using L.V. Kantorovich's methods of linear programming, dynamic models of the economy, methods of input-output balances of V. Leontiev and other progressive tools. Another was associated with the name of V.M. Glushkov, head of the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev, who proposed the OGAS (National Automated System) project. This project was the most global and at the same time the closest to implementation, since it was developed as part of a direct government assignment - Glushkov was entrusted with the development of information aspects of the system for transforming the economy, called the "Kosygin reform".
The project closest to reality, as it now appears, was developed by the aforementioned A.I. Kitov in the Ministry of Defense. He proposed creating a network of mainframes for dual use: to manage the economy in peacetime and to manage the army in case of war. All the advantages and necessity of this project were so obvious to him that he did not think at all about the need, as they say now, "PR" - promotion among the authorities and getting support. He simply sent the proposals “to the very top” and waited for a positive reaction.
The System's reaction could be predicted. “Objective economic indicators” were needed by the then officials no more than transparency was needed by modern shadow dealers. (Glushkov characterizes Soviet economists: “ who didn't count anything at all"). The objection that was put forward to Glushkov at the Politburo level is characteristic: “ Optimization methods and automated management systems are not needed, since the party has its own management methods: for this it consults with the people, for example, convenes a meeting of the Stakhanovites or collective farmers-shock workers". Poletaev was not among the authors of the project (which was entirely created by Kitov alone), but together with other associates of the author openly defended the undertaking. One of V.I.Kitov's colleagues, Colonel-engineer V.P. Isaev writes : “… All sane scientists and employees who worked in the Computer Center-1 of the USSR Ministry of Defense or were involved in it at that time, understanding the sound logic and the enormous usefulness for our country of A.I. Kitov, supported Anatoly Ivanovich and his project with their speeches at the Commission of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR (including NP Buslenko, LA Lyusternik, AA Lyapunov, IA Poletaev and others). "
This support cost dearly, first of all, to those who were in the ranks of the Armed Forces. The main political department of the army asked the only question: "Where is the leading role of the party in your car here?" The author of the project, A.I. Kitov, was fired from the army in 1960, and those who held him, including Igor Andreevich, in 1961, were formally due to seniority, after all, almost all of them were veterans of the 1941 draft. Later, other directions were also defeated: Brook was removed from the leadership of INEUM simultaneously with the fall of Khrushchev, the "Kosygin" reform was curtailed. Only ten years later they started talking seriously about ACS and ACS in civilian life and about army control systems.
Poletaev moved to Novosibirsk, where he became the soul of scientific symposia and completed his main work. Poletaev's son, Andrei Igorevich, in his article in memory of his father recalls the words of the famous biologist and mathematician Albert Makarevich Molchanov: “ Cybernetics was said to be a reactionary pseudoscience. This is not true. At first– not reactionary. Secondly– not a lie, but thirdly– not science. This thought could belong to Igor Andreevich, it seems to me».
Andrey Poletaev, son of I.A. Poletaev, in his student years at the Physics Department of Moscow State University, 1963
He turned out to be right - Poletaev put forward the thesis that cybernetics is not a science, back in the late fifties. But a discussion of this issue would take us far beyond the scope of the article.
Physicists and Lyrics
A well-known contemporary of Pushkin, E.A. Baratynsky, expressed the general negative feeling of the onset of the century, as we now say, of technocrats in the following significant words ("The Last Poet"):
Disappeared in the light of enlightenment
Poetry, childish dreams
And generations are not worried about her,
They are devoted to industrial concerns.
It seems that the outstanding poet grasped the very essence of the problem - science was reproached for ignoring the "beautiful" from the very moment of its inception. Chateaubriand in early XIX century proposed to prohibit science altogether. Kant looked for rational grounds for morality, and came to the conclusion that they do not exist. The situation was aggravated in the middle of the XX century, when science, so to speak, “lost its innocence”. If before that the typical image of a scientist - the absent-minded eccentric Paganel - certainly included a certain desire "to seek the truth," "to selfless knowledge of the laws of nature," the concept of "pure science" existed and was cultivated, then starting with the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the public stopped believing this image.
Against this background, at the end of the 50s, a discussion "about physicists and lyricists" arose simultaneously in the West (C.P. Snow) and in the USSR. The very fact that such a discussion arose, regardless of its level and consequences, was very significant: Tarkovsky's film "The Mirror" begins with the metaphor "I can speak." In an utterly ideological post-Stalinist society, the emergence of such a phenomenon is in itself unusual - there is no doubt that it was not sanctioned from above in any way. A completely honest statement of one's opinion in the central (!) Printed publications, and the polarization of these opinions, almost without regard to the "only correct teaching", was of great importance for the formation of the social climate of that era.
The discussion got its name from the lines from b. Slutsky's poem, which was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta on September 13, 1959:
Something physics is held in high esteem,
Something lyric in the pen.
It's not about dry calculation,
The point is in the world law.
It means that something was not revealed
We are what we should be!
Means weak wings –
Our sweet iambas ...
But the publication of these poems happened a week and a half after the start of the discussion itself.
The impetus to the beginning was the publication in Komsomolskaya Pravda on September 2, 1959, an article by I. Erenburg "Answer to one letter". A student of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute, Nina V., spoke about her conflict with a certain engineer: “ Once I tried to read Blok's poem to him, - the correspondent wrote. - He listened reluctantly, told me that it was outdated, nonsense and now a different era. When I offered him to go to the Hermitage, he got angry, he was already there, and in general it is not interesting, and again that I do not understand our time ... Of course, he is an intelligent and honest worker, all his comrades have high opinions about him. and I could listen for hours when he talked about his work, he helped me understand the importance of physics, but he does not recognize anything else in life ..."The question was quite in the spirit of the times:" is it true that interest in art is being supplanted in our century by powerful scientific progress"?. Ehrenburg also replied quite in the spirit of the times: “ ... I believe that passion, will, inspiration will prevail among those who have not only great knowledge, but also a great heart". The supporters of Ehrenburg's point of view in the future more than once referred to E. Popova's speech: “ I am convinced that even there, in space, a person will struggle, suffer, love, strive to explore the world wider and deeper. A man in space will need a branch of lilacs!". This "branch of lilacs in space" became the banner of "lyricists" who opposed art to "soulless" science. Now they would only laugh at such pathos, but the reaction of the then readers to the article was extremely quick and active. No modern publication would refuse to repeat such a journalistic success.
It would all have ended without leaving a trace in our memory, if the note in Komsomolskaya Pravda had not caught Poletaev's eye. As you can judge from the above, Igor Andreevich was a master of verbal duels. In Ehrenburg's article, he was infuriated primarily by the level of discussion - as he himself recalled: “ How can you print that! Precisely to print, because at first I never for a second doubted that I. G. Ehrenburg was printing one thing, but thinking another (he is not a complete fool, in fact, with this "spiritual virgin soil"". Perfectly knowing both science and art from the inside, Poletaev with the usual sense of humor went to the provocation: “Can it be argued that modern life is increasingly following artists and poets? No. Science and technology create the face of the modern era, more and more influence tastes, morals, human behavior ... We live by the creativity of reason, not feelings, the poetry of ideas, the theory of experiments, construction. This is our era. It requires the whole person without a trace, and we have no time to exclaim: ah, Bach! ah, Block! Of course, they are outdated and not in size with our life. Whether we like it or not, they have become leisure, entertainment, and not life ... Whether we like it or not, poets have less control over our souls and less and less teach us. The most fascinating fairy tales are presented today by science and technology, an accurate, bold and merciless mind. Not to admit it means not to see what is happening around. Art fades into the background - in rest, in leisure, and I regret it together with Ehrenburg ". And he signed - "Poletaev (engineer)", and under this name he became instantly known throughout the country.
They took him seriously, and even so seriously that the discussion spread to the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta, "Literature and Life", magazines "Moscow", "Foreign Literature", "New World" and other publications. “Engineer Poletaev” had many like-minded people, but the majority were still against it. In just almost five years, which lasted the discussion (until 1964), it was attended by academicians, literary scholars, journalists, writers and poets, and even foreign authors (C. Snow and M. Wilson).
All these people, except, of course, those who personally knew I.A. Poletaev (and those in the public discussion, apparently, did not participate) and did not suspect that Igor Andreevich himself:
- knew English, German, French, italian, Czech, Polish and Japanese, as well as with a dictionary read in Swedish, Greek, Chinese and Hungarian;
– had perfect pitch and musical education, all his life he was mastering new musical instruments, for example, by the end of his life he mastered the violin and flute;
– at home he collected a huge collection of classical music recordings, he was also very fond of the songs of Charles Trenet and Yves Montand;
– he was engaged in sculpture, painting, filming of amateur films, applied arts (blowing from glass). According to the testimony of his son, he envied Mukhina and Konenkov, because he himself would not have been able to, and the rest - no, he felt that he could express himself no worse.
And his performance was just a provocation, a desire to bring out the talkers and idlers, who were simply innumerable in Soviet art by that time. In modern terms, Poletaev “threw up the lyricists like suckers,” they ingenuously took the bait, and he himself watched with satisfaction how a virtual “engineer Poletaev” was beaten and how many nonsense they said.
Here is his real position, in his own words: “ What did I defend (and I did “defend” something) in this dispute? I remember it, and I am ready to “defend” even now. Probably what I defended can be briefly called “freedom of choice.” If I or someone X, as an adult, in my right mind and firm memory, chose an occupation for myself, then – At first– let him do as he wants, if he does not interfere with others, and even more is beneficial; secondly, let no bastard dare to tell him that you, they say, X – bad because you are a carpenter (engineer, g ... clean – add the necessary), and I – Y– good, for I am a poet (musician, burglar thief – add the necessary). ... The trouble will begin when a fool, a bohemian dropout, a verseplet, who calls himself, like a crab without fish, a “poet”, comes to a hard worker, an engineer, and will be insolently annoying with the statement that he is “uncultured”, because he is not involved in poetry. This is exactly what Ehrenburg said, may the earth rest in peace to him ».
And this confession, published after the death of Igor Andreevich by his son, takes the whole problem to a completely different level. Dthat art, of course, could not be turned towards a dispute about "freedom of choice." If it turned out that in fact the question is about the foundations of an "open society", the coexistence of cultures and worldviews, then no discussion would simply take place. It's a pity, because the question is still not closed at all, and has many more levels, which Poletaev himself, most likely, did not even know about.
On his tombstone in the Novosibirsk Academgorodok it is written - "engineer IA Poletaev".
He did a lot for the development and popularization of cybernetics. With the assistance of Admiral Academician A.I. Berg, he wrote and published the first book in our country about this new science. The book was called "Signal", which had both scientific and symbolic meaning [20_20]. The book was extremely relevant. It contains the basic concepts of information theory and computational mathematics. It tells about computers and robots. He was an engineer, mathematician, military man. In this capacity, they became friends and collaborated with A. A. Lyapunov. He, above all, was a highly cultured artistic person. He knew the main European languages. He loved and knew music (graduated from a music school).
IA Poletaev in the exact sense of the word provoked a whole social and cultural movement - the division into "physicists" and "lyricists".
In the autumn of 1959, Komsomolskaya Pravda published his letter - an objection to I.G. Ehrenburg. In a paradoxically ironic style, he wrote, in essence, that a rigorous scientific thought can compete in beauty with works of art. What exclamations "Ah, Bach!" and "Ah, Block!" by themselves are not evidence of the refinement of the soul.
Igor Andreevich Poletaev
That cybernetic machines can write music of hymns or poetry according to a given vocabulary and rhythm using simple programs. He signed this note "Engineer Poletaev". Some kind of dam has broken. Hundreds of letters from agitated girls went to the editorial office of the newspaper. They pitied the engineer P., devoid of aesthetic feelings and not attached to the treasures of culture. This went on for many years. The division into "physicists and lyricists" has become a literary cliché. And one of the most cultured people in the country laughed contentedly, not getting involved in the discussion. But, seriously, there was a point in this movement. It created a new attitude towards the capabilities of the "machine mind". The first programs for a chess game, machine translation of multilingual texts, and pattern recognition have already been created. And Igor Andreevich himself, following K. Chapek and together with his friends at the Miassovo biological station with NV Timofeev-Resovsky, composed a funny play about "KRUR" ah "- mutually replicating universal robots, cybernetic self-replicating human likenesses that once rebelled. And Their creator - engineer Poletaev and his friends with screwdrivers rushed to turn the cogs that turned them off, but they quickly confused, the cogs disappeared.KRURs multiplied and drove people into the impenetrable jungle with pits left after the excessive extraction of valuable minerals A. A. Lyapunov. But after the victory over the man, they, deprived of the selection pressure, degenerated. The robots languidly wandered around the village and sang to the tune "The priest had a dog" in binary code: "zero, zero, one, zero, one, one, zero , zero, one ... ". Now it was possible to take them" with bare hands. "This play in the then new genre of tape performance with a well-chosen (A.F. Vanin) musical background from the music of Bach, Be thoven, Gershwin was solemnly performed at an evening dedicated to the first graduation of students from our Department of Biophysics, Physics Faculty of Moscow State University in January 1961.The heroes of this play are the creator of KRURov I.A.Poletaev, passionate collector of the mineralogical collection A.A. Lyapunov, the mighty N.V. Timofeev-Resovskiy, employees of the Miassovo biological station, students. They were really friends. They were united by a deep commonality of life positions and mutual affection. The main characters are no longer in the world. Let this funny play remain a monument to that cheerful and disturbing time, the time of bright, multifaceted people.
