terogers <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU> wrote:

> There certainly is a lot of stuff that leaks out of the cracks about
> fuzzy logic, but we should try to be clearer in these debates.

    Tom:

    Agreed.  My message started out as a simple description of the
    FuzzyTech-MP product, but it then got out of hand.  If I'd
    realized (as I should have) that I was starting a "debate", I
    would have been a little more precise.

> Bart Kosko may have written a pop book, but he first wrote a
> textbook. It's a bit thick but it should be taken as the statement
> of choice from Kosko. Nowhere does he state any of the many silly
> things popularly attributed to him. I've also read his pop book,
> which also doesn't contain any of the silly statements attributed to
> him.

    On the other hand, the "silly statement" I attributed to him
    (that "fuzzy logic is a superior control algorithm than the
    others because it can be used to express all the others") was
    said in my presence by the man himself.  I'm paraphrasing, of
    course, but I don't think I've lost anything in the
    translation... He was pretty specific about this.

> Supersets are not super in any but the set theory sense. Maybe the
> word super should be avoided.

    Actually, this was exactly my point in rebutting Kosko's
    argument... The fact that other algorithms can be expressed in
    fuzzy-logic terms doesn't make fuzzy "superior".

> Fuzzy logic is not on the same level with PID algorithms. It
> presents an opportunity to approach the problem of problem solving
> differently.
> ....
> The problem with fuzzy logic comes in bringing the result back from
> the fuzzy domain, not in tweaking the rules. I find that every time
> I apply it I have to 'break my brain' and allow the old assumptions
> to leak out and fade away. It's not an easy process, 'cause I've
> been formulating and solving problems with binary logic and
> computing hardware since before the 4004. The essence of binary
> logic is baked into my deepest instincts.

    I think we agree here, too... Although I just glossed over it in
    the postscript to my message, it seems to me that one of the
    indisputable advantages of fuzzy-logic (which you and I find
    personally to be somewhat of a disadvantage) is that the process
    of developing fuzzy-logic algorithms is very different from
    traditional development.

    For us, this means that we have to bang our heads against the
    wall a little.  For people untrained in the science of software
    engineering, who don't have the "burden" of our years of
    experience and the assumptions that have grown out of that
    experience, it means that they can develop a fuzzy-logic
    algorithm as easily as WE develop PID or other algorithms.

> P.P.S. Do you really think of assembly language as a superset of
> other languages? Hmmm..

    Only in the sense that Bart Kosko used when he claimed that
    fuzzy-logic was a superset of PID... Anything written in a
    high-level language eventually compiles into assembly, so any
    high-level program could conceivably have been written directly
    in assembly language.

    -Andy

Andrew Warren - fastfwd@ix.netcom.com
Fast Forward Engineering, Vista, California
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2499