Word: likes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...magazine ads and in novel electronic gadgets ranging from computer-controlled air conditioners to golf-swing analyzers. The concept of fuzziness has struck a cultural chord in a society whose religions and philosophies are attuned to ambiguity and contradiction. Says Noboru Wakami, a senior researcher at Matsushita: "It's like soy sauce and sushi -- a perfect match...
What is fuzzy logic? The original concept, developed in the mid-'60s by Lofti Zadeh, a Russian-born professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, is that things in the real world do not fall into the neat, crisp categories defined by traditional set theory, like the set of even numbers or the set of left-handed baseball players. In standard Aristotelian logic, as in computer science, membership in a class or set is not a matter of degree. Either a number is even, or it is not. But this on-or-off, black-or- white...
...tall men, George Bush (6 ft. 2 in.) might have a membership value of 0.7, while Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (7 ft. 2 in.) might have a 0.99. Zadeh and his students went on to elaborate a full fuzzy mathematics, devising precise rules for combining vague expressions like "somewhat fast," "very hot" and "usually wrong...
Fuzzy logic began to find applications in industry in the early '70s, when it was teamed with another form of advanced computer science called the expert system. A product of research into artificial intelligence, expert systems solve complex problems somewhat like human experts do -- by applying rules of thumb. (Example: when the oven gets very hot, turn the gas down a bit.) In 1980 F.L. Smidth & Co. of Copenhagen began marketing the first commercial fuzzy expert system: a computer program that controlled the fuel-intake rate and gas flow of a rotating kiln used to make cement...
Despite such successes, fuzzy logic was not well received in the U.S. Scientists pointed out that uncertainty and vagueness could be represented perfectly well by more traditional means, like statistics or probability theory. Some of the criticism bordered on the vituperative, and the tenets of fuzzy logic were dismissed with terms ranging from "comical" to "content- free...