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Sidebar from Forbes "All Eyes on Google" article (discussed on WW here [webmasterworld.com]).
first time I have read a mainstream article connecting Google with Fuzzy Logic.
:) that is very, very good news for the science & math community. I was just thinking this weekend too that some of the advanced pagerank research I had been reading sounded an aweful lot like somebody was reading some stuff on fuzzy sets & continuums & what not.
Microsoft has been using fuzzy logic in their engineering since at least 1992.
Google, being the smart folks they are, have very good reason to bark up the same tree.
Sorry to side track this more, but digging through Google for "google fuzzy logic" brought up this from Lofti Zadeh, the guy who coined the term 'fuzzy logic' in the 60's:
[cs.berkeley.edu...]
He mentions that all search engines are using fuzzy logic to one degree or another (in 2000).
I bring this up because if you read the google papers ( the original ones...) they refer to 'probabilistic...etc' stuff.
Bart Kosko, the 2nd biggest name (as far as I know) in fuzzy logic in the US produced a mathematical proof that fuzzy logic is a 'superset' of probability.
better math = better engineering.
Nice to see somebody wake up & smell the coffee.
Most software developers use fuzzy logic to one degree or another, usually without realizing that they would qualify for the buzzword. Every time you're quantifying something on a scale (as opposed to using a simple yes or no flag), you'll have fuzzy logic in action. It's a very natural thing to do in many situations, and you don't really need to understand Lotfi Zadehs theoretical constructs to use it successfully.
In most cases, when someone claims that a product (search engine, washing machine, etc.) uses fuzzy logic, it's just a marketing gimmick that sticks a different label to a standard method that their competitors use in almost exactly the same way. Actually, I don't think it would even be possible to return relevant search results without applying a bit of fuzzy logic here and there...
