The Ratio Club was founded in 1949 by the neurologist John Bates as a small dining club in London for young British scientists interested in the ideas that Norbert Wiener had just named cybernetics. It met regularly until 1955 and was formally wound up in 1958.
Members
Membership was capped at around twenty and deliberately excluded professors, to keep discussion open. Members included W. Ross Ashby, W. Grey Walter, Alan Turing, the physiologist Horace Barlow, the physicist Donald MacKay, the neurophysiologist Albert Uttley, the psychiatrist Eliot Slater and the radar engineer Philip Woodward. Warren McCulloch was a guest at the first meeting.
Discussions
Meetings were held over dinner, often at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, with a talk followed by open debate. Topics included the brain as a computing machine, information theory in neurophysiology, pattern recognition, learning machines and the question of whether machines could think. Turing presented ideas from his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), and Walter and Ashby demonstrated their tortoises and homeostat.
Significance
The Ratio Club was the core of British cybernetics, which was more hands-on and less tied to military funding than its American counterpart. Its members went on to shape artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience and robotics in Britain.
Further reading
- Phil Husbands and Owen Holland, “The Ratio Club: A Hub of British Cybernetics”, in The Mechanical Mind in History (2008)
Mentioned in
- Article A Brief History of Cybernetics
- Article Cybernetics as a Discipline
- Person W. Ross Ashby
- Community The Cybernetics Society
- Person W. Grey Walter