- Ratio Club
The Ratio Club was a small informal
dining club of young psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers who met to discuss issues incybernetics .The idea of the club arose from a
symposium on animalbehaviour held by the Society of ExperimentalBiology inCambridge , July1949 . The club was founded by the neurologist John Bates and continued to meet until1958 .The name "Ratio" was suggested by Albert Uttley, it being the Latin root meaning "computation or the faculty of mind which calculates, plans and reasons". He pointed out that it is also the root of "rationarium", meaning a statistical account, and "ratiocinatius", meaning argumentative. The use was probably inspired by an earlier suggestion by Donald Mackay of the MR club, from "Machina ratiocinatrix", a term used by
Norbert Wiener in the introduction to his then recently published book "Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". Weiner used the term in reference to "calculus ratiocinator", a calculating machine constructed byLeibniz .The initial membership was
William Ross Ashby ,Horace Barlow , John Bates, George Dawson,Thomas Gold ,W. E. Hick , Victor Little, Donald MacKay, Turner McLardy, P. A. Merton, John Pringle, Harold Shipton, Donald Sholl,Eliot Slater , Albert Uttley, W. Grey Walter and John Westcott.Alan Turing joined after the first meeting with I.J. Good,Philip Woodward and William Rushton added soon after.The club was the most intellectually powerful and influential cybernetics grouping in the UK, and many of its members went on to become extremely prominent scientists.
References
* Citation
last=Husbands | first=Phil | author-link= Phil Husbands
last2=Holland | first2=Owen | author2-link=Owen Holland
contribution = The Ratio Club: A Hub of British Cybernetics
editor-last=Husbands | editor-first=Phil | editor-link= Phil Husbands
editor2-last=Wheeler | editor2-first=M.
editor3-last=Holland | editor3-first=Owen | editor3-link=Owen Holland
year = 2008
title = The mechanical mind in history
isbn = 978-0262083775
publisher = MIT Press
location = Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.]
oclc = 181142511
*, p. 95.External links
* [http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article020101.html "Grey Walter’s Anticipatory Tortoises"] by Margaret Boden, in: "The Rutherford Journal", Volume 2, 2006-2007
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