Rating: 
Summary: Title is apt
Review:
Unfortunately, this book says more about the author than the subject. If you want a book that demonstrates a problem, illustrates a potential solution and its applications; then don't buy this. This is a very personal and hence cloudy view of the subject matter. There is some useful information in this book but it is hidden behind the grand philosophical statements or buried in the foot notes.
Has this author ever met an empirical scientist, rather than mathematicians or philosophers. Scientists love measuring things.
No scientist would ask the question 'Is an apple red or green?' They would pose the question 'How much pigment (in milligrams) of each of a series of colours does each apple have?' Or in truth something far more obtuse. In fact the fuzzy logic treatment would be a bit black and white for most scientists.
I suspect that there is a great deal more to the subject that the author communicates and I felt a bit cheated that there was not more substance in this book.
Did I miss something? If I did then the book did not work to convey the subject. If I didn't then fuzzy logic is one of a myriad of tools to handle uncertainty, and thus is a small branch of probability.
Rating: 
Summary: good for students of all types of philosophy
Review: A book worth the read for students of the philosophies of the inner and outer worlds. A spirited appeal for toleration and wisdom, a plea against the closed mind in all of us, and a clarion call to those who think they have any answers. A word about the book's dedication, though. Would that everyone had the opportunity to do three degrees! Make the most of whatever you have.
Rating: 
Summary: On of the best approach to Fuzzy Logic
Review: A very good invitation to discover Fuzzy Logic. One of the book you must read before reading more technical (or more mathematical) books. You might not like Kosko's style of writing but anyway, the content is terrific and the ideas are there.
Rating: 
Summary: Approximate reasoning for more accurately decisions
Review: An important contribution for the management of uncertainty. Kosko's approach for the integration of cultural values and mathematics is remarkable.
Rating:
Summary: A reader
Review: As a kid thinking about Probability I was very uneasy, intrigued and befuddled by its nature and was never satisfied by any explanations I could find in any book. In Fuzzy Thinking, Kosko does a magnificent job of explaining away the mystery.
Rating:
Summary: Enlightened me regarding the nature of probability
Review: As a kid thinking about Probability I was very uneasy, intrigued and befuddled by its nature and was never satisfied by any explanations I could find in any book. In Fuzzy Thinking, Kosko does a magnificent job of explaining away the mystery.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Primer
Review: As a software developer who is constantly researching new methods of creating algorithms, I have found this book to be an excellent primer. In fact, it is such a good book, an engineer I used to work with STILL hasn't returned it. What does this book give you? This book explains some of the history of what we dub Fuzzy Logic, and many of the applications it has been properly used for. However, I think that the most valuable information in this book is what Fuzzy Logic is NOT. For quite a while, Fuzzy Logic was a buzz word much like artificial intelligence - and unfortunately, this diluted the actual ability of the technology. Dr. Kosko went through great pains to explain what Fuzzy Logic is good for - and what it is not. A previous reviewer made comments regarding his/her assumption of hostility of Western Philosophy to Fuzzy Logic. I am inclined to agree to a point. However, when a technology that can be as useful as this is going to be compared to the long standing Western (and Eastern, mind you) tradition of Boolean logic, it is important for the author to address these issues in a manner which separates the two forms of thought. I think the author was quite successful in this, and should be commended. Dr. Kosko, in an *almost* Richard Feynman type of approach( as far as simplicity and technical communication), has pierced the veil of Fuzzy Logic such that students, engineers, scientists and business people can understand the essence of Fuzzy Logic, and educates the reader on this technology that is making some things easier - from mixing concrete to less bumpy elevators. I give this book a 4 star approval, only because I am a difficult person to please.
Rating:
Summary: Good insight as to how fuzzy logic fits with AI
Review: Bart Kosko gives a remarkable insight as to the value of fuzzy thinking in problem solving. Although the book leans towards the philosophical aspects, it fills a void left by mathematical texts. It is well worth reading if you are in the business of modeling physical systems for any purpose. Towards the end of the book,however, Kosko's philosophy does teeter on the edge of the deep end. He might actually fall in at points.
Rating:
Summary: fuzzy vs concrete
Review: Before going out on my own, I worked in an office where the music was always too loud or too soft. The problem was the volume control mechanism embedded in the wall. At setting 1, the music was audible but too low to hear. At setting 2, the music was loud enough to disrupt concentration and made you jam the phone against your ear. I longed for a round knob control that offered a continuum, but had to be satisfied with 1 or 2. This throwaway analogy illustrates Kosko's frustration with "bivalence." We do not live in a black and white world. Many things are in between, and science is silly to pretend otherwise. It is not just the engineers and physicists- economists also suffer greatly from this delusion (largely because economics is little more than sociology dressed up with fancy math). Reality is messy, complex, and does not fit into a box. A simple statement at heart, but one with profound implications that Kosko does a wonderful job of exploring. With the statement "precision up, fuzz up" Kosko reiterates a truth known since biblical times. I like T.S. Eliot's version, "All our knowledge only brings us closer to our ignorance." Excess information obscures as much as it reveals. Relevant facts are lost in the wash of noise, like needles in the proverbial haystack. And even the relevant facts are subject to interpretation, counterweighting, and levels of degree. I felt that the systems Kosko described were not "fuzzy" as much as "flexible." They still make black and white decisions, they just make a higher number of decisions and thus have a more averaged or "fuzzy" result. A machine that utilizes fifteen data points will be much more versatile and flexible than one that only uses two, but it is still a binary system at heart. Maybe our brains are binary as well, except with gazillions of data points to access. But that is a subject for another book (one by Penrose perhaps). The ultimate application of a fuzzy system would be to design a trading application that siphons billions from the world financial markets, allowing the scientist to conduct further research from his deck chair in the Cayman Islands. But it will never happen. No computer program, fuzzy or not, flexible or not, will ever outperform a logically grounded set of trading rules. Can computers optimize a set of rules, like those that apply to washing machines or traffic lights? Yes. Can they predict the future outcome of the stock market? No. The actions of a chaotic/reflexive system can never be predicted with true accuracy, because the stream of variables is too fast and furious to follow. Even for a supercomputer, it would be like drinking from a firehose. Thousands of opinions converge and diverge every second. Unforeseen events jar the market like random electrical shocks. Feedback amplifies itself, the way a sound looped from speaker back to microphone becomes an ear splitting shriek. Feedback diffuses itself, like soft spring rain on a pond. The market measures itself and reacts to itself a thousand times a day, a living embodiment of the Heisenburg principle. The puzzle has a trillion pieces that spontaneously rearrange at will. You can stump a computer with the turbulence in a glass of water, and yet it's supposed to decipher mass interaction? I'm not holding my breath. As the book progresses, Kosko gets more and more wildly optimistic in his predictions of what fuzzy logic might be capable of, what fuzzy machines could do. He goes out on a limb and overshoots his premise by a country mile by the time you reach the last page, filling the last half of the book with rabbit trails, but that is okay by me. Fuzzy logic is his baby, his contribution to the world. So it is completely natural that he would bubble over with possibilities and offshoots of his original thesis. Excitement gets your brain going. Separate the wheat from the chaff and enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: Buddha lite
Review: Buddhist math? C'mon.
First, let me say that fuzzy logic and fuzzy arithmetic are great tools. They're valued parts of the 'soft logic' kit that includes probability, interval arithmetic, Bayesian and Markov networks, and lots of other good stuff. Fuzziness involves many of the formal techniques used in probability and elsewhere, and gives a useful, alternative view of the systems it addresses.
The basic fuzzy idea is that most descriptions involve shades of gray, that few systems really match the black/white, on/off, either/or duality of standard formal logic. That's fine, I can get along with that quite well.
My problem, though, is that Kosko presents the fuzzy world-view vs. the traditional or "scientific" in exactly the black and white terms that he rejects. He also argues that fuzziness describes the world more effectively than "scientific" terms, that the rules of arithmetic, probability, and calculus are just games. They are played for their internal consistency, not because differentiation or factorials occur in nature.
That's true, and as a heavy math user I know enough to distinguish my models from reality. Two facts remain, though. First, the models very often do describe reality in ways that can be checked easily enough: the bridge doesn't fall down and the TV receives its signal. Both happen because the bad old exact arithmetic has some kind of correspondence (no, I don't know what) to the real world, giving real ability to predict real results. Second, fuzzy logic and fuzzy arithmetic are themselves mathematical formalisms, games like all the others. Once you get past the gee-whiz stage, there is mathematical content as rigorous as in any other field of study. It's not either/or, it's very often a different way to interpret the same self-consistent games people have played for years. It adds interesting rules to the game.
The great thing is that you really can use the new interpretations and tools along with the old ones. Fuzziness doesn't demolish the old structures, it bolsters them and adds capacity.
And you can get all these benefits without shrink-wrapped, bite-sized pieces of Eastern philosophy.
//wiredweird
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