Article 21739 of comp.ai:
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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
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Message-ID: <2p173m$k1g@csi0.csi.uottawa.ca>
References: <Pine.3.87.9404192217.A12770-0100000@cmu.chiangmai.ac.th>
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In article <Pine.3.87.9404192217.A12770-0100000@cmu.chiangmai.ac.th>, Wasun Chan
tratita <asmsi002@CMU.CHIANGMAI.AC.TH> 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