The real world is complex which is full of ambiguities. We say that a person whose height is 6 feet as tall and another who is 5 feet as short. But deciding exactly at what point in between 5 and 6 a short person becomes tall is practically impossible. We can never say that a person who is 5 feet 7 inches is tall and one who is 5 feet 6 is short or even deciding when a new building becomes old one, as the transition from short to tall and new to old is gradual, not abrupt.

The above example is very simple. In our daily life we come across many situations where deciding whether a particular proposition is either true or false is extremely difficult. They can be both true and false at the same time. That is because of the fact that it satisfies both the conditions for being true and false to a certain extent. This is where ambiguity arises. But we are very efficient in deciding these kinds of uncertainties as we get used to perceiving them from very early stages of our life. That is how humans are taught to think and take decisions accordingly. This particular kind of reasoning we employ in understanding things is nothing but “Fuzzy Logic”. We are not aware of our train of thoughts involved in arriving at such conclusions but believe me we do a lot of imprecise reasoning there.

We are very familiar that computers use Boolean or binary logic which deals with 1 and 0 or True and False which means that they take decisions basing on whether or not a particular condition is satisfied. If it satisfies then a certain action is triggered if not something else is done. But as we have observed this is not that useful when it comes to our daily and more practical lives where we are confronted with many half true and half false circumstances. If we want computers to take decisions using a more human like way of thinking we should go for Fuzzy Logic which is why it is so extensively used in Artificial Intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »