News about the W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive

This page contains announcements about the Digital Archive.

• April 2022 — An Ethical Systems page was added for Mick Ashby's research into the cybernetics of ethical regulators, which builds on the good regulator theorem and the law of requisite variety.
• January 2021 — The previously unpublished 190 page booklet "The Origin of Adaptation", written in 1941, is available as a PDF.
• December 2020 — Mick Ashby's research into the cybernetics of ethical systems was published in the Systems journal as a concept paper, "Ethical Regulators and Super-Ethical Systems".
• October 2020 — The mirror copy that was hosted on ashby.de since March 2018 is no longer available.
• March 2018 — A new page was added to make it easy to access the contents of Mechanisms of Intelligence: Ashby's Writings on Cybernetics (1981) by Roger Conant.
• 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.
• August 2016 — The Journal view was extended with an option to switch between normal resolution images (1900 pixels wide with enhanced contrast) and ultra-high-definition images (4k pixels wide with the original color balance and contrast).
• April 2016 — The British Library featured Ross on two blogs: "Pioneering cybernetics: an introduction to W Ross Ashby" and "The Thinking Machine: W Ross Ashby and the Homeostat".
• January 2014 — Various photos of conference participants were added to the Centenary Conference page.
• November 2013 — Thanks to Ronan Le Roux, who contacted us with scans of four previously unpublished letters that Ross wrote to the French mathematician, Jacques Riguet. We created a Letters from Ross Ashby to Jacques Riguet page, which also includes thumbnails of Journal pages that mention Riguet and help show how Ross was influenced by him.
• January 2013 — In the Biography, a table of contents was added and in the section about the Homeostat, we have added thumbnails of all Journal pages that contain newspaper clippings about the Homeostat.
• April 2010 — It appears that we have mistakenly been misrepresenting the An Introduction to Cybernetics PDF as being the second edition. The PDF is the second impression of the first edition.
• September 2009 — Transcripts of all summaries that Ross wrote at the end of his journal entries (over 2,300) are available on the Summaries page, and the text of each summary is included above the appropriate journal images and thumbnails.
• April 2009 — The contents and images of the 14½-category, 830-card Other Index were integrated into the archive.
• February 2009 — The International Journal of General Systems Volume 38, Issue 2, edited by Peter M. Asaro and George J. Klir, is a special issue about "The Intellectual Legacy of W. Ross Ashby".