I want to summarize a little bit: “What the Fuzzy logic is about”, so that you can get some feeling out of it.
Fuzzy logic includes 0 and 1 as extreme cases of truth but also includes the various states of truth in between so that, for example, the result of a comparison between two things could be not “tall” or “short” but “0.38 of tallness.”
Fuzzy logic is almost synonymous with the theory of fuzzy sets, a theory which relates to classes of objects with unsharp boundaries in which membership is a matter of degree.
There is a high number of things/objects with unsharp boundaries. For example think about the surface area of Pacific Ocean. Wikipedia states that the value is 165,250,000 km2, but we can immediately see that it is rounded and contains a lot of imprecision. How would you express the value to make it more precise:
- What about tides (water fluctuation, Moon’s movement, Earth rotation, solar gravitational effects, …)? The high of the ocean differs throughout day and year. Should we have a function with time parameter?
- What about icebergs melting?
- What about shore lines constant change?
- What precision should we except: km2, m2, mm2?
- …
It is very useful to understand that it is merely impossible to get the most accurate value which correctness can not be improved any more. This is stressing out how importatn it is to learn working with imperfection and how to get practical maximum out of it.
A trend that is growing relates to the use of fuzzy logic in combination with neurocomputing and genetic algorithms. More generally, fuzzy logic, neurocomputing, and genetic algorithms may be viewed as the principal constituents of what might be called soft computing. Unlike the traditional, hard computing, soft computing accommodates the imprecision of the real world.
Fuzzy logic is essential to the development of human-like capabilities for AI. Living organisms aggregate data and form a number of partial truths which are being aggregated further into higher truths which in turn, when certain thresholds are exceeded, cause certain further results such as motor reaction. A similar kind of process is used in:
Lotfi Zadeh’s research (credited with fuzzy logic’s formulation) focused on implementing methods that allowed computers to understand human language.
References / Quotation sources
List of references, from which I’ve quote + taken expressions: