“…subservience to the use of man has played that part among machines which natural selection
has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdoms…” Samuel Butler, 1863.
Art, War, and Cambridge Cybernetics
This paper traces the lines of descent of early cybernetic machines created by Gordon
Pask and his friends and colleagues in Cambridge, England. The descendants of these
machines date from the 1950s to the time of Pask’s death in the mid 1990s. To trace
their descent is to move from the worlds of art and entertainment (Pask’s words) to
business and military domains. In so doing, the geographical loci soon shift from
Cambridge to elsewhere in Britain and to the United States. This paper argues that if
we are to understand these changes we must consider the effect of what Samuel Butler
(1863), in his application of Darwinism to the life and growth of machinery, refers to
as “subservience to the use of man”. It is argued, in other words, that investment
support afforded by commercial and military sponsors underpinned the
transformations we witness through several generations of Paskian machines.
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Gordon Pask (1928-1996) began whilst still at Cambridge University to make
adaptive, learning machines. The first of these early cybernetic machines now exists
only in the form of a description by Pask’s business colleague, friend, and
collaborator Robin McKinnon-Wood. The ‘Music Typewriter’, seemingly created
around 19521, transposed sound to musical notation. (A performer could play music to
it and the Music Typewriter would write it down, saving the necessity or
inconvenience of doing so). The lessons learnt in the creation of this machine lead
directly to another machine, Musicolour and to Pask’s first commercial machines,
“In 1952 I became interested in the interaction between men and ‘learning’ machines, constructed
some rather whimsical automata”. Pask, G. (1961) p. 89.
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SAKI (Self Adaptive Keyboard Instructor) and EUCRATES (a computerised tutorial
environment):
“Sit a pianist at a piano and tell him to play to strict time, record him, and he isn't
Give him a metronome and tell him to follow it, and he'll say he is but he isn't. Tell
him off and he walks off in a huff. The solution to that problem is, I believe the first
self-adaptive machine designed by System Research, and led directly to the design of
self-adaptive tracking tasks, the SAKI typing trainer, Eucrates, and many other
systems.” McKinnon-Wood, R. (1993, p. 130).
Musicolour is possibly Pask’s best-known creation. It seems to have been made in
19532 in Cambridge: “The first Musicolour machine was built and demonstrated... at
Jordan’s Yard, Cambridge in 1953” (Pask 1971, p. 77). It went through several
different incarnations3. Essentially, it converted a sound input to a light display.
However, crucially (and this distinguishes it from the many light displays by others
that were to follow it) it incorporated aspects of both cybernetic learning and teaching.
Musicolour “incorporated a rudimentary learning facility able to modify the relation
of the auditory vocabulary to the visual vocabulary as a performance went on”. It was
this “learning capability” that was, as Pask quickly realised, “the interesting thing
about Musicolour” (ibid. p. 78) as performer and machine learnt from each other in
interaction.
The fact of the historical and logical precedence of these art machines over their
business, and it will be seen, military relations, was recognised by Pask and
McKinnon-Wood and has since been acknowledged by, for instance, Andrew
Pickering (2002, p. 9) who writes, “Pask’s cybernetics, then, had its first home in the
worlds of the arts and entertainment”.
There are several striking things about these first cybernetic learning-teaching
machines. To begin with, there is their novelty, in respect of the creation of this type
of machine. It is for this reason that Pask can be credited as the originator of the
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3
Pask (1962) dates it to 1954-1955 (p. 135).
Pask (1982, p. 143) writes: “We constructed two machines…and christened them Musicolour”.
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adaptive machines4. Associated with this is their relationship to the history of
cybernetics: it is significant that these machines precede Pask’s meeting with US
based cyberneticists such as Von Foerster (which dates from 1958). There is the
possibility also that they precede his reading of Norbert Wiener’s founding text on the
subject, his Cybernetics. This I have been unable to verify5. Pask (1966) notes that he
had been dabbling in several fields: "the important feature of each seemed to be its
underlying organisation. Cybernetics seemed to set a seal of respectability upon this
way of thinking" (p. 159). This suggests that he had arrived at important insights prior
to reading Wiener. Stafford Beer (Beer, 2001) another influential cybernetic theorist,
many years later, wrote of he and Pask: “We were both extremely conscious of the
pioneering work being done in the USA in the emerging topic that Norbert Weiner
(sic) had named cybernetics” (p. 551). But Beer did not meet Pask until 1956. It is not
clearly established therefore when Pask was first exposed to cybernetic theory.
Whatever is the case, plainly his machines were extremely prescient of a growing
trend.
Pask did not cease his interest in machines with non-commercial applications. But
why is it that gradually but decisively his work for industrial and military sponsors
gained primacy? Musicolour had an uneven career6, ending in 1957. Straightforward
economics contributed to its demise, more than the technical problems that
occasionally bedevilled it. Pask (1971) remarked of Musicolour: “Since the system
was costly to maintain and since the returns were modest, the Musicolour enterprise
fell into debt” (p. 86). He continued, it “was clear that in large scale (and
commercially viable) situations, it was difficult or impossible to make genuine use of
the system” (ibid. p. 88).
So ‘Sirenelle’, a company dedicated to musical performances, became ‘System
Research’, moving to Richmond Surrey (in closer range of London, where cybernetics
4
Gregory, Richard L. (2001, p. 685), "At Cambridge, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, he was
dedicated to notions of learning machines...He was the pioneer - very possibly the original inventor of self-adaptive machines".
5
Pask (1966) remarks: " the publication of 'Cybernetics' (Wiener, 1948) had something of an emotional
impact" (p. 159). However, the date he gives is that of the publication of Wiener’s book, not when he
first read it.
6
“…at one extreme as a pure art form, at the other as an attachment for juke boxes” Pask (1971, p. 86).
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was to flourish in the 1960s). In this change, despite McKinnon-Wood’s claim to the
contrary,7 came a shift in emphasis. It is difficult not to suppose Pask’s experiences
with Musicolour to be the prompt for his decisive move into making business
machines. (The one major exception to this was to be the Colloquy of Mobiles of 1968,
exhibited in Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA Gallery, London, 1968).
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EUCRATES debuted in 1957 at the British Physical Society exhibition. This machine,
named after the sorcerer’s apprentice, was commissioned and part-designed by Chris
Bailey of the Solartron Company. A dozen were marketed as specialised computers
with “particular application as adaptive teaching machines” (Pask, G. and Curran, S.
1982, p. 144).
The practice of specially constructed machines that could be customised for particular
usages was to set the pattern for later editions of Paskian machines. Two important
examples were to be CASTE (Course Assembly System and Tutorial Environment)
and Thoughtsticker. Cold War military sponsors soon were to take an interest in both.
This latter aspect of Pask’s biography, it may be no surprise, is not easy to follow as it
involves research that may have had, in its time, security implications. There are few
allusions to it in Pask’s own major published writings. There is only passing reference
to it in the writings of his colleagues. Ranulph Glanville (1993, p. 9) for example
mentions commissions from the US Army, Navy and Air Forces, the (British)
Ministry of Defence and Home Office (as well as some of the more mundane, such as
the Road Research Laboratory). The reason for subjecting this area to scrutiny is that
to fail to do so obscures an understanding of an important part of Pask’s achievements.
“For my part, I first knew him as an artist and as a director. Show Biz. So it was wholly consistent
that the first Company we formed was called Sirenelle, and was dedicated to the staging of Musical
Comedies. This, in turn, was wholly consistent with the development of self-adaptive systems, selforganizing systems, man-machine interaction etc. So we changed the name to System Research Ltd –
not that this made any real difference” McKinnon-Wood (1993) p.129.
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4
Searches of the U. S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences
Technical Library (“ARI”) for ‘Pask’ (see the online catalogue at
http://arit.sirsi.net/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/49) produce results for papers such as, Current
Scientific Approaches to Decision Making in Complex Systems. III. Volume II.
Conference Position Papers, credited to Pask and dated 1980. A copy of a similar
paper dated to 19758 contains in its Abstract discussion of decision making in
“man/machine systems”.
What were these systems and how do they relate to the discoveries made by Pask in
the 1950s? This question is hard to answer, as the full extent of Pask’s activity for
such funders as the British and US Navies is not clear. What is certain is that Pask’s
tutorial environments found application in military contexts but that also this was not
their only usage. This would appear to be the case for CASTE, which as Pask notes,
was in one version used by schools (Pask and Curran, p. 166). However it is also the
subject of a paper listed by the ARI credited to ‘Gregory, D’: CASTE (Course
Assembly System and Tutorial Environment) and CVI: (Combat Vehicle
Identification) A First Application of an Intelligent Tutorial System to Combat Vehicle
Identification, dated 19849.
Thoughtsticker was a development of CASTE. Like CASTE, it was not specific to
military employment, but could be adapted to this purpose. And this was in fact what
happened. Again, piecing together evidence, it would seem that Thoughtsticker began
as a specialist machine, similar to others we have encountered. This also made it
prohibitively expensive:
“The demo ran on Symbolics AI workstations. The demo always concluded with our
guests asking, "How much does this computer cost?" On giving the answer, "Around
$100,000", that was it, demo over. This was true for Navy Admirals, company
research directors, vice presidents of research, and so on.”
http://www.pangaro.com/THSTR-Brochure/THSTR-Brochure.html
8
Pask, G. (1975) ARI TECHNICAL REPORT. Current Scientific Approaches to Decision Making in
Complex Systems. Kindly supplied by Pask’s colleague, Dr Paul Pangaro.
9
See http://arit.sirsi.net/uhtbin/cgisirsi/s0YfEqOO2x/0/49780005/9.
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However, it appears eventually to have been recreated as software running on existing
US Navy machinery. “For the US Army Research Institute, a videodisc interface
controlled by THOUGHTSTICKER has been developed to demonstrate training of a
vehicle identification task”, as a ‘Product Description’ of October 1987 puts it. One
may only guess as to the sort of task referred to. It is likely to be associated with this:
“A requirement of ISS10 experimentation is the creation of a submarine gaming
simulation. It represents the command and control task in its rules of play, and uses
graphic displays to illustrate the results of action”.11
Whatever the exact details are, it is clear from this that the line of descent that began
with Musicolour continued with generations of adaptive machines. This adaptiveness
is both specific and more general. Specialised versions of learning environments were
created. But there is also the issue of the general adaptiveness of cybernetic ideas to
very different environments.
I have only discussed Pask. But cybernetics flourished both sides of the Iron Curtain
(as well as finding favour, in Stafford Beer’s work, with the socialist government of
Allende’s Chile). Many looked to cybernetics in its heyday for solutions to their
different problems. As such, cybernetics operated across ideologies as representative
of a significant innovation related to modernity and progress, post-war. This last
observation, however, is the subject for another investigation.
Pask and System Research’s machines found a relatively conducive environment in
the interest afforded by both military and business organisations throughout the 1960s,
70s, and 80s. Pask's ability as creator of machines for art and entertainment ultimately
found fewer backers.
“Intelligent Support Systems”. These were developed for the British military’s ‘Admiralty Research
Establishment’ in Teddington. See, Pangaro, P. Pangaro Incorporated. Brief History. Section 4,
http://www.pangaro.com/PI-Brochure/ARE.html.
11
Pangaro, P. THOUGHTSTICKER Intelligent Training and Information Management Software.
Product Description of October 1987, http://www.pangaro.com/PI-Brochure/ARE.html.
10
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Pangaro, P. (1997) ‘THOUGHTSTICKER: An Idiosyncratic History of Conversation
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Author: Dr Wayne Clements. Contact: wayne.clements@btinternet.com
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