Marian Mazur, “Cybernetyczna maszyna” (‘Cybernetic Machine’), entry in Wielka Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN (‘Great Universal Encyclopaedia’), vol. 2, Warsaw 1963, p. 642 (entry signed by the author).
What makes a machine cybernetic? The answer this short entry gives is functional: what decides is what the device does — it controls itself and processes information — not what it is built from. This approach will stay with the author for good; the entry “Cybernetyka” (‘Cybernetics’) in the same volume raises it to the rank of a method for the whole field.
The rest of the entry is a matter of putting things in order. Machines are divided by two criteria, principle of operation and application, and a single device usually combines several principles. Among the applications are the Western models of physiological processes that were famous at the time.
More interesting is what the entry does not yet contain. The words message and information have a general technical sense here; the first precise definitions will come in Cybernetyczna teoria układów samodzielnych (‘A Cybernetic Theory of Autonomous Systems’, 1966), and the version given in the dictionary in Jakościowa teoria informacji (‘A Qualitative Theory of Information’, 1970). Also missing is the division that will turn out to be the most important one for Mazur: between machines that control themselves according to a criterion imposed by a human being and machines that act in their own interest. Mazur presented it in the same year in the article “Myślenie maszyn” (‘The Thinking of Machines’), based on a lecture from October 1962, and in full in Cybernetyczna teoria układów samodzielnych (1966). The concise encyclopaedic form left no room for such an argument, so the entry is best read as a point of reference: it shows how much the later theory of autonomous systems added to the common understanding of the cybernetic machine.