Seventh International TAKIS Congress, Nitra, Slovakia, September 2002, Cybernetics in Theory and Practice
The Congress was held during September 2-5 in the pleasant town of Nitra, the fourth largest in the Slovak Republic (after Bratislava, Košice and Prešov). The venue was the University of Constantine the Philosopher, where the philosopher commemorated is the same person as the monk Cyril after whom the Cyrillic alphabet is named. Saints Cyril and Methodius consecrated, in Nitra,the first church in Slovakia in 830 AD, and were associated with the introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet as an adaptation of the Greek one to the Slav languages. The town, therefore, has a long history of attention to means of communication.
The organisation TAKIS (World association for cybernetics, computer science and system theory) was founded in 1983 in Namur, Belgium as a branch of the International Association for Cybernetics based in Namur. The Namur organisation was founded as early as 1957 but has fairly recently ceased to function, both because of the cessation of funding in Belgium and the death of the founder,Professor G.R. Boulanger. There is the suggestion that TAKIS should be seen as the continuation of the Namur organisation and that this congress should count as the 16th of the International Association for Cybernetics.
Nitra and Namur are towns of about the same size (Nitra just under 90,000 population and Namur just over 100,000) and both have pleasant pedestrian areas with open-air restaurants and cafes. A feature of the Nitra meeting was that it could be attended at low cost. The conference fee was 70 Euros, and participants received a book containing the 34 accepted papers, as well as coffee in the intervals and a generous buffet at an informal reception on the Tuesday evening. The book (ISBN 80-8050-522-5) of 304 pages is nicely prepared. Accommodation was available at low cost, the cheapest (and very cheap) being in the university's student hostel. The cost of excellent restaurant meals was also extremely low.
The number of participants was in the region of 40. In the book of proceedings there are contact details for authors of most of the papers, of which nine are from the host country of Slovakia, eight from the Czech Republic,four from Romania, three from Hungary, two each from Germany and Slovenia, and one each from Britain, France and Poland.
Papers could be submitted in any of the languages Slovak (or Czech), ILo,German, English or French, where ILo is essentially Esperanto. There was the stipulation that each paper should have an abstract in its own language and also in one other from the list. Some stress was put on the matter of language, and the organisers of the Congress are also enthusiasts for ILo. Of the 34 papers in the book, 17 had their main language as Slovak (or Czech), while ten were in English, six in ILo and one in German. The secondary language was English for 17 of the papers, German for seven, French and ILo for four each, as well as Slovak for two. One paper had two other-language abstracts so is included in the counts for both English and ILo as secondary languages, and one had slipped through without meeting this requirement at all.
In the opening session, after speeches of welcome by the Rector of the University and by the Dean and Director of the Pedagogical Faculty, I had the opportunity to convey the greetings and good wishes of Professor Robert Vallée on behalf of WOSC. There were then addresses by Professor Eva Polákováand Professor Helmar Frank, respectively, the president and a vice- president of TAKIS. Professor Poláková (in Slovak, pp. 35-40) reviewed previous conferences and developments in the Slovak and Czech republics. The address by Professor Frank (in German, pp. 11-33) had the title: “Das Haus der Kybernetik” and raised a number of controversial issues concerning the establishment of an international. “Dachverband” for Cybernetics,the term meaning literally a roof-association though perhaps better translated as an umbrella-association.
Professor Frank referred deprecatingly to the inauguration of WOSC, with its claim to be a world organisation, at a time when the Namur association already existed. He was also critical of it on the grounds that its congresses and journal use the English language almost exclusively, though he conceded that other languages had been allowed in some of the more recent congresses. He gave a brief history of the development of cybernetics in which he mentioned Wiener,Shannon and von Neumann, but not Pitts and McCulloch, whose collaboration with Wiener gave birth to the new discipline.
The subject headings of the meeting were given as:
- 1.
Cybernetics of the humanities, with a subsection anthropocybernetics:
language cybernetics,
psychocybernetics,
educational cybernetics,
aesthetic cybernetics, and
applied cybernetics of media use.
- 2.
General cybernetics.
- 3.
Engineering cybernetics.
- 4.
Biocybernetics.
Papers were allocated to sections but all were given in the same room, with no parallel sessions. There were no contributions to Sections 1.2, 1.4 or 3.
My own paper: “A review of altruism” was assigned to Section 1,and in it I argued that altruism is a more basic human characteristic than is suggested by the “selfish gene” arguments of Dawkins, and that the world situation can be helped by seeking ways of fostering it. The only concrete recommendation was that altruism should be encouraged by international travel and contacts and the learning of languages. For the latter I had to admit to being myself a bad example, as a native speaker of English with little fluency in other languages. Apart from the reference to languages the paper had little connection with others presented. (It appears in English on pp. 43-52 of the book of Proceedings.)
In Section 1.3, Professor Frank delivered a lengthy paper, and engaged in discussion, entirely in ILO, so demonstrating the adequacy of the language for scientific exchange. His topic was an information-theoretic treatment of certain observations on reaction time using a tachistoscope. (In ILo, pp. 95-102.)
Also in that section was a paper by a group of Hungarian workers, on: “The amelioration of the perception of space and depth by the help of Virtual Reality”. They showed pictures of 3-D “component” shapes, along with larger structures that might be made from them, and the task a viewer was to decide whether the larger structure could be formed from these components. Other pictures showed a representation of a convoluted piece of string, or shoelace,and the problem was to decide whether or not it would become a straight unknotted line when the ends were pulled. The paper reported a study which showed that performance in making such judgements was definitely improved by exposure to VR simulations of the assembling of 3-D shapes, and of appropriate manipulations with strings. This well-presented paper was warmly applauded, and appears in English on pp. 103-109 of the Proceedings, with illustrative graphics.
Other papers dealt with applications of information technology in medicine,and one from another group of Hungarian workers was on a simplified means of access to the Internet that might be used by immobile patients in hospital to send messages to friends. (In English, pp. 281-285.)
Three papers in the original programme represented an active interest in biomathematics in Romania. One was by G. Acalugaritei on the artificial neural networks that bear his name and is in English on pp. 223-230 of the proceedings(see also Kybernetes, Vol. 29 No. 5/6, 2000, pp.755-769). Another was by S. Baiculescu (in English, pp. 267-279) and related the theory of neural nets to more general biological principles. The third was by E. Otlacan and R.-P. Otlacan (in English, pp-243-251) on a mathematical theory of memory, which utilised a formula initially derived by Professor Robert Vallée.
The paper by Acalugaritei was not presented, but it is interesting that there appears to be this hive of interconnected activity in biomathematics in Romania. My own reaction to it is that it is rather short of references to real biological systems or practical artificial neural networks, but this may be due to my very limited acquaintance with the work and it would be good to learn more.
An unusual feature of the congress was the insistence on the use of a multiplicity of languages, and the advocacy of ILo. The alternative adopted for many international conferences is to standardise on English, and of course this is welcomed by native English speakers who have neglected the study of other languages. The reluctance of native speakers of English to acquire other languages apparently dates from at least the time of Shakespeare, if we are to judge by a scene in The Merchant of Venice (first performed c. 1597) in which the heroine Portia reviews her various suitors and makes it clear that her main complaint about Falconbridge, her English admirer, is that he speaks no language but his own.
However, the conducting of a conference in a number of languages is not ideal and tends to inhibit discussion. Even if some of the reasons for widespread learning of English do not reflect any credit on native speakers of the language, there is, I think, a case for accepting that it has become,paradoxically, the world's lingua franca. One of its bad features, the often ludicrous mismatch between spelling and pronunciation, is at least partly offset by the ready availability of software spell checkers. As was said to me by a native speaker of German during the TAKIS meeting: “Esperanto is a nice idea, but it is too late for it to overtake English”.
A perhaps more perceptive comment was made by a native speaker of Romanian who remarked that her 7-year-old grandchild was unenthusiastic about most subjects taught at school, but was keen to learn English because it would allow appreciation of some cartoons shown on television. This illustrates that a language has to be a living thing and that what Esperanto would need in order to succeed, even more than an Esperanto Göthe or Shakespeare, would be an Esperanto Beatles and Hollywood.
The matter of language policy will continue to be debated, but certainly the TAKIS Congress was an enjoyable experience in a very pleasant setting, as well as offering much interesting material in the papers presented.
Alex M. Andrew
