The Paradoxical Success of Fuzzy Logic

  • Authors:
  • Charles Elkan

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and Their Applications
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

Fuzzy logic methods have been used successfully in many real-world applications, but the foundations of fuzzy logic remain under attack. Taken together, these two facts constitute a paradox. A second paradox is that almost all of the successful fuzzy logic applications are embedded controllers, while most of the theoretical papers on fuzzy methods deal with knowledge representation and reasoning. I hope to resolve these paradoxes by identifying which aspects of fuzzy logic render it useful in practice, and which aspects are inessential. My conclusions are based on a mathematical result, on a survey of literature on the use of fuzzy logic in heuristic control and in expert systems, and on practical experience in developing expert systems.