At the beginning of the new millennium, fuzzy logic opens a new challenging perspective in information processing. This perspective emerges out of the ideas of the founder of fuzzy logic - Lotfi Zadeh, to develop 'soft' tools for direct computing with human perceptions. The enigmatic nature of human perceptions manifests in their unique capacity to generalize, extract patterns and capture both the essence and the integrity of the events and phenomena in human life. This capacity goes together with an intrinsic imprecision of the perception-based information. According to Zadeh, it is because...

The book focuses on both the engineering applications of fuzzy logic and soft computing and its social applications and philosophical insights at the dawn of the third millennium. The included papers clearly demonstrate that fuzzy logic revolutionizes general approaches to solving applied problems and reveals deep connections between those approaches and the underlying unique theoretical framework. The book consists of three parts: Understanding Society, Mathematics, and Modelling and Control Systems. The first part reveals different aspects of fuzziology, a new study of fuzziness inherent in...

Fuzziology studies the fuzziness inherent in what we know about ourselves, the sources and nature of our experience, our thoughts and feelings, drives for understanding and urges to create and realise our potential. This kind of fuzziness is at the core of our existence, at the essence of our humanness. It affects any field of human activity, be it mathematical study of fuzzy equations and fuzzy integrals; engineering design and implementation of fuzzy logic-based methodologies; fuzzy control systems or fuzzy robots. Social fuzziology investigates the role of fuzziness in understanding the...