The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive

William Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was a British pioneer in the fields of cybernetics and systems theory. He is best known for proposing the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, intelligence amplification, the good regulator theorem, building the automatically stabilizing Homeostat, and his books An Introduction to Cybernetics and Design for a Brain.

In 2003, Ross's family gave his journals, papers, and correspondence to the British Library, London. Then, in March 2004, on the last day of the W. Ross Ashby Centenary Conference, they announced the intention to make his journal available on the Internet. Four years later, this website fulfilled that promise, making this previously unpublished work available on-line.

The journal consists of 7,189 numbered pages in 25 volumes, and over 1,600 index cards. To make it easy to browse purposefully through so many images, extensive cross-linking has been added that is based on the keywords in Ross's original keyword index. To jump directly to a particular journal page, enter the page number here: then press Enter.

The biography describes Ross's life in more detail than has previously been available in the public domain, and includes many photographs from the family's private albums. Various other information and resources can be accessed via the navigation frame on the left.

In July 2017, at the International Society for the Systems Sciences conference in Vienna, Mick Ashby presented the ethical regulator theorem, which builds upon the good regulator theorem and the law of requisite variety. For more information, see The Ethical Regulator Theorem.