Proceedings of the Ninth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, organised by the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies, held at the University of Vienna, Austria, 5-8 April, 1988

The "world" is becoming more and more intractable. We have learned to discern "systems" in it, we have developed a highly sophisticated math ematical apparatus to "model'" them, large computer simulation programs handle thousands of equations with zillions of parameters. But how ade quate are these efforts? Part One of this volume is a discussion containing some proposals for eliminating the constraints we encounter when approaching complex systems with our models: Is it possible, at all, to design a political or econom ic system without considering killing, torture, and oppression? Can we...

This volume contains all papers presented at the Eighth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research. 169 draft papers were submitted for evaluation. In the process of careful refereeing, 33 papers were rejected and the remaining authors were invited to submit final papers. Out of these, 119 were accepted for presentation at the conference and publication in this volume. These papers were prepared by 173 scientists, authors and co-authors, from 22 European and non-European countries, with different cultural, social, and economic structures. Everybody tried hard to make this conference...