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When we look at the history of Fuzzy Logic, we find that the first important person for its development was Buddha. He lived in India about 500 BC and founded a religion called Buddhism. His philosophy was based on the thought that the world is filled with contradictions, that almost everything contains some of its opposite, or in other words, that things can be A and not-A at the same time. Here we can see a clear connection between Buddha's philosophy and modern fuzzy logic.
About 200 years later, the Greek scholar Aristotle developed binary logic. In contrary to Buddha, Aristotle thought that the world was made up of opposites, for example male versus female, hot versus cold, dry verus wet, active versus passive. Everything has to be A or not-A, it can't be both.
Over the centuries, these two philosophies developed and spread independently. Buddhism expanded as the religion of India and surrounding states. Aristotle's logic, however, was accepted by the Greek scholars and later got spread all over Europe; first by the Romans and then through Christianity. The Christian church created a devil to opposite God, talked about heaven and hell, and put a holly Maria against a sinful Eve.
Aristotle's binary logic became the base of science; if something got proven with logic, it was and still is accepted as scientifically correct. Like many others, Russell tried to reduce math to logic. When he discovered his paradox while working, he got scared himself. It did, however, give him the honor of being one of the fathers of fuzzy logic.
In 1964, professor Zadeh started wondering, if there wasn't a better logic to use in machinery.He had the idea that if you could tell an air-conditioner to work a little faster when it gets hotter, or similar problems, it would be much more efficient than having to give a rule for each temperature.
Anyway, that was the day fuzzy logic the way we know it today was born; with fuzzy logic you can tell an air-condidioner to slow down as soon as it gets chilly.
It took a long time until fuzzy logic got accepted even though it fascinated some people right from the beginning. Besides engineers, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists soon became interested in applying fuzzy logic into their sciences.
In the year 1987, the first subway system was built which worked with a fuzzy logic-based automatic train operation control system in Japan. It was a big success and resulted in a fuzzy boom. Universities as well as industries got interested in developing the new ideas. First, this was mainly the case in Japan. Since the relegions in Japan acceped that things can contain parts of their opposites, it wasn't such a frightening idea as in most other parts of the world. And fuzzy logic promised lots of money to the industries, which was of course welcome too.
Today, almost every intelligent machine has fuzzy logic technology inside it. But
fuzzy logic doesn't only help boast machine IQs. If we could give up the idea of
everything having to be good or bad, we could also see the good things in other people.
We wouldn't have to reduce all our fellow people to Gods or devils. Everyone has her or
his good qualities. And it is our job to find them! (And using the
Clicker Method we can make
sure that they improve their good qualities!)
