Article 21739 of comp.ai: Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:21739 Path: honeydew.srv.cs.cmu.edu!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!godot.cc.duq.edu!birdie-blue. cis.pitt.edu!gvls1!psuvax1.cse.psu.edu!news.ecn.bgu.edu!mp.cs.niu.edu!vixen.cso. uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!chpc.utexas.edu!news.utdallas.edu! corpgate!bnrgate!nott!uotcsi2!usenet From: misrael@kaml2.csi.uottawa.ca (Mark Israel) Newsgroups: comp.ai,bionet.software Subject: Re: What are fuzzy-logic based programmes Followup-To: comp.ai Date: 19 Apr 1994 18:15:18 GMT Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, University of Ottawa Lines: 35 Message-ID: <2p173m$k1g@csi0.csi.uottawa.ca> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: kaml2.csi.uottawa.ca In article , Wasun Chan tratita writes: > I have heard many people mentioning about fuzzy-logic process or > programme. I wonder what it is. Could anyone kindly provide me some light? Fuzzy logic is an approach to reasoning where the rules of inference are approximate rather than exact. It's useful for manipulating information that is incomplete, imprecise, or unreliable. Traditional set theory defines set membership as a boolean predicate (e.g. "tall" means being greater than some specific height, and either you're tall or you're not). *Fuzzy* set theory represents set membership as a possibility distribution (the greater the numeric value assigned to your height, the more likely you are to be tall). Once set membership has been redefined in this way, you can define a reasoning system based on techniques for combining distributions. Fuzzy logic has applications in control theory. When you're programming a robot or other appliance to function in a complex environment, fuzzy rules may be easier to derive and faster to use than explicit formulae. Since fuzzy logic is used chiefly for efficiency, some people think that it's doomed by the emergence of massively parallel processing. Fuzzy logic was invented in 1964 by Lofti A. Zadeh, a professor at Berkeley. For a technical account, see Zadeh's "A Theory of Approximate Reasoning" in _Machine Intelligence 9_, ed. J. Hayes et al., New York: Halstead Press, 1979. For a popular account, see _Fuzzy Logic_ by Daniel McNeill and Paul Freiberger, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993, ISBN 0-671-73843-7. Followups to comp.ai. misrael@csi.uottawa.ca Mark Israel