Noise by Bart Kosko  (14)
$5.99
|
Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic by Bart Kosko  (45)
|
Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems: A Dynamical Systems Approach to Machine Intelligence/Book and Disk by Bart Kosko  (3)
|
Fuzzy Logic: The Revolutionary Computer Technology That Is Changing Our World by Daniel Mcneill  (10)
$12.60
|
Fuzzy Logic for Beginners by Masao Mukaidono  (5)
$18.00
|
This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime, but millions of other items are. Join Amazon Prime today. Already a member? Sign in.
|
|||||||||||||
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
As the leading American proponent and theorist of the software-design philosophy known as fuzzy logic, Bart Kosko, author of Fuzzy Future: From Society and Science to Heaven in a Chip, can be expected to have high hopes for the discipline. And it's not like it hasn't lived up to some of them already. Forsaking the binary either/or at the heart of digital computing, fuzzy logic's emphasis on the shades of gray between true and false makes it a valuable way to program microchips that guide factories, cars, household appliances, and other gadgetry that works with the physical world's nonbinary facts. It also makes for a pretty slick philosophical end run around the yes-or-no logic that has been the basis of Western thought for the last couple of millennia.
As the leading American proponent and theorist of the software-design philosophy known as fuzzy logic, Bart Kosko, author of Fuzzy Future: From Society and Science to Heaven in a Chip, can be expected to have high hopes for the discipline. And it's not like it hasn't lived up to some of them already. Forsaking the binary either/or at the heart of digital computing, fuzzy logic's emphasis on the shades of gray between true and false makes it a valuable way to program microchips that guide factories, cars, household appliances, and other gadgetry that works with the physical world's nonbinary facts. It also makes for a pretty slick philosophical end run around the yes-or-no logic that has been the basis of Western thought for the last couple of millennia.
But here Kosko announces that fuzzy logic is ready to do more. Taxes, voting rights, abortion, warfare, genetic engineering, deep physics, computer-generated art, the quest for transcendent posthuman immortality--all of these and more, he tells us, may in the future be transformed by the powerful techniques of fuzzy thinking. The overall result: less government, ignorance, poverty, death; more power to the people. This of course is exciting news, and that may explain why Kosko sometimes seems less than interested in nailing down the details of what fuzz has to do with any of it. So if it's an education in fuzziness you want, look elsewhere--at Kosko's earlier, more introductory Fuzzy Thinking perhaps. But for a vivid snapshot of fuzzy thinking at its most ambitious, jump right on in. --Julian Dibbell
From Publishers Weekly
Kosko's Fuzzy Thinking (1993) explained to laypeople the provenance and uses of "fuzzy logic," a technique of mathematics and engineering that takes into account approximations, half-truths and good guesses about states of affairs that can't be evaluated well in black-and-white terms. Kosko's very readable followup applies "fuzziness" to government, economics and wars ("Fuzzy Politics"); to physics, chemistry and biology ("Fuzzy Science"); and to computers ("Fuzzy Digital Culture"). Sometimes fuzziness, as Kosko explains it, seems mostly an excuse to connect useful, brief explanations of concepts already known by other names. His application of "fuzz" to culture and history, for instance, may strike some readers as coals to Newcastle: a square with four corners (liberal, conservative, libertarian, populist) certainly explains political ideology better than a mere left-right continuum, but is the idea really Kosko's? His explanations of neural networks, entropy and statistical approximation, on the other hand, will give lay readers handy descriptions of important and hard-to-grasp concepts. "Fuzzy logic" in computer science and engineering have helped machines approximate the seat-of-the-pants, rule-of-thumb decision making humans already accomplish. A provocative final chapter promotes the idea that digital networks will be able to hold our own (still-fuzzy) consciousnesses, putting an end to human death: "Biology is not destiny for the minds that will follow us.... Chips are destiny." The breezy, self-assured style of Kosko's chapters contrasts sharply with his meticulous footnotes; readers with some background in areas Kosko covers will want to read both together. Nine b&w illustrations. Author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|
