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From: marksc@wpmail.code3.com (Mark A. Scarton)
Subject: Re: Why complicate things?
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Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 16:43:14 GMT
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palun@strix.udac.uu.se (Ulf Nordlund) wrote:
>WHY DO YOU TRY TO KEEP YOUR RESULTS / DISCUSSIONS 
>OUT OF REACH FOR THE PEOPLE WHO REALLY NEED THEM!? 

>Why are fuzzy logic texts ("scientific" ones, that is) 
>so crammed with mathematical symbolism and so devoid 
>of plain text and simple examples? Fuzzy logic is after 
>all an area which is extremely easy to explain using 
>words and simple graphics. My suspicion is that a 
>subject which is so fundamentally simple and 
>comprehensible to virtually anyone, may be regarded 
>as less "scientific" and therefore needs to be "spiced" 
>with a lot of "hocus pocus" symblos in order to raise 
>the status of the subject (and, at the same time, 
>limit the accessibility). 

Excellent questions.  Actually, you do have several authors that publish at a
range of levels.  Several that come immediately to mind as having been extremely
influential to me personally are Bart Kosko, Brian Gaines, Zadeh (obviously),
Zimmerman, and George Klir.  Not that some of what they publish won't spin your
head around, but they also have articles/volumes which articulate the concepts
with such conceptual clarity that even I understand.  ;-)  The key attribute of
these folks is that they deal with complexity, uncertainty, information theory,
etc. at multiple levels of abstraction and metadefinition.  Kosko's work was
particularly informative for me, since he uses dimensional representations in
additional to describing the mathematical constructs.

I think that the problem that many of the rest of us face is that (a) we're
focused on applying the constructs, and/or (b) we have to publish in journals
that require the underlying mathematical underpinnings to be exposed.  I am of
the former ilk...I am applying these to medical informatics.  Things get
complicated really quick.  Before this, my research dealt with tracking aircraft
and ballistic missiles.

Yes, mathematics and statistics can be used to "snow" the reader.  But just as
often, they are being used to express the underlying systemic assumptions and
real-world to model transformations.  And unfortunately, nonmathmatical systems
for expressing the constructs are immature (my opinion of course, as is
everything else expressed herein).

Software requires algorithms, algorithms today are most often abstracted
mathematically.  The day is coming when this might not be so.  Techniques for
the direction expression of visualization, intentional programming constructs,
etc. are coming, but we're at least a decade away from being able to use them to
build cars, hospital instrumentation, etc.  And company's are allowing less time
and opportunity for pure research, moving the scientists to product development.
So the opportunity for abstracted discussions outside of the context of real
world problem solving is dwindling.

