About

We are an EU-based nonprofit organisation working on pure and applied research and open source software development. We are interested in all aspects of complex systems, optimization, control and intelligence, but our primary focus is on machine learning and economic theory.

We are neither academic nor startup, but at a nexus between both. Our work is motivated by both curiosity and urgent social need.

What is cybernetics?

The popular understanding of the word “cybernetics” has drifted over time to mean biotechnology, but its original meaning in the 1960s was the interdisciplinary study of controlling complex systems, in fields such as ecology, economics and computer science. Due to the urgent need for an interdisciplinary approach to 21st-century problems, and the emergence of category theory as a new mathematical foundation, we believe the time is now right to try to reclaim the original dream of cybernetics, and its name.

What is categorical cybernetics?

Category theory is a field of mathematics that arose out of topology and geometry. Applied category theory (ACT) is a recently-emerged interdisciplinary field that applies methods of category theory to practical problems, achieving industrial success in fields such as quantum computing and natural language processing.

Categorical cybernetics, or CyberCat for short, is a sub-field of ACT focussing on optimization and control, using a small set of category-theoretic tools such as optics and open games.