A Brief History of Fuzzy Logic

Abstract

The problems of uncertainty, imprecision and vagueness have been discussed for many years. These problems have been major topics in philosophical circles with much debate, in particular, about the nature of vagueness and the ability of traditional Boolean logic to cope with concepts and perceptions that are imprecise or vague. The Fuzzy Logic (which is usually translated into Castilian by “Lógica Borrosa”, or “Lógica Difusa”, but also by “Lógica Heurística”) can be considered a bypass-valued logics (Multi-valued Logic, MVL, its acronym in English). It is founded on, and is closely related to-Fuzzy Sets Theory, and successfully applied on Fuzzy Systems. You might think that fuzzy logic is quite recent and what has worked for a short time, but its origins date back at least to the Greek philosophers and especially Plato (428-347 B.C.). It even seems plausible to trace their origins in China and India. Because it seems that they were the first to consider that all things need not be of a certain type or quit, but there are a stopover between. That is, be the pioneers in considering that there may be varying degrees of truth and falsehood. In case of colors, for example, between white and black there is a whole infinite scale: the shades of gray. Some recent theorems show that in principle fuzzy logic can be used to model any continuous system, be it based in AI, or physics, or biology, or economics, etc. Investigators in many fields may find that fuzzy, commonsense models are more useful, and many more accurate than are standard mathematical ones. We analyze here the history and development of this problem: Fuzziness, or “Borrosidad” (in Castilian), essential to work with Uncertainty.