William Ross Ashby (6 September 1903 – 15 November 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.
His two books, Design for a Brain and An Introduction to Cybernetics, introduced exact and logical thinking into the brand new discipline of cybernetics and were highly influential. These "missionary works" along with his technical contributions made Ashby "the major theoretician of cybernetics after Wiener".
Early life and education
William Ross Ashby was born in 1903 in London, where his father was working at an advertising agency. From 1921 he studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he received his B.A. in 1924 and his M.B. and B.Ch. in 1928. From 1924 to 1928 he worked at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Later on he also received a Diploma in Psychological Medicine in 1931, and an M.A. 1930 and M.D. from Cambridge in 1935.
Career
Ashby started working in 1930 as a Clinical Psychiatrist at the London County Council. From 1936 until 1947 he was a Research Pathologist at St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton in England. From 1945 to 1947 he served in India where he was a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
When he returned to England, he served as Director of Research of the Barnwood House Hospital in Gloucester from 1947 until 1959. For a year, he was Director of the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol. In 1960, he went to the United States and became Professor, Depts. of Biophysics and Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, until his retirement in 1970.
Ashby was president of the Society for General Systems Research from 1962 to 1964. After retiring in August 1970, he became an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wales in 1970 and a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1971. In June 1972 he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and he died on 15 November.
Work
Despite being widely influential within cybernetics, systems theory and, more recently, complex systems, Ashby is not as well known as many of the notable scientists his work influenced, including Herbert A. Simon, Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Stafford Beer, Stanley Milgram, and Stuart Kauffman.
Journal
Ashby kept a journal for over 44 years in which he recorded his ideas about new theories. He started May 1928, when he was medical student at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Over the years, he wrote down a series of 25 volumes totaling 7,189 pages. In 2003, these journals were given to The British Library, London, and in 2008, they were made available online as The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive. Ashby initially considered his theorizing a private hobby, and his later decision to begin publishing his work caused him some distress. He wrote: My fear is now that I may become conspicuous, for a book of mine is in the press. For this sort of success I have no liking. My ambitions are vague—someday to produce something faultless. Ashby found writing so difficult that he took correspondence courses in "Effective English and Personal Efficiency" to prepare to write his first book.
Adaptation
Ashby was interested in mechanistic explanations for adaptive behavior, especially in the brain. By 1941, he had developed a coherent theory and written a 197-page booklet, titled "The Origin of Adaptation". This hand-written monograph was made publicly available in January 2021. In it, he expressed his opinion that "there is an abstract science of organisation, in the sense that there are laws, theories and discoveries to be made about organisation as such without asking what it is that is organised."
In 1948 Ashby built a machine, the homeostat, to demonstrate his theories. The machine used a simple mechanical process to return to equilibrium states after disturbances at its input. Earlier, in 1946, Alan Turing had written a letter to Ashby suggesting that Ashby use Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) for his experiments instead of building a special machine. Norbert Wiener, describing the appearance of purposeful behavior in the Homeostat's random search for equilibrium, called it "one of the great philosophical contributions of the present day". Ashby's first book, Design for a Brain, was published in 1952 and recapitulated this line of research.