At the heart of fuzzy logic is Zadeh's Principle of Incompatibility, which
states that precision and significance are incompatible. Malcolm provides a
good example of this.
The first customer is obviously an ecologist by the way, who else would bore
the waitress with so many significant figures?
Bill Silvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "malcolm McCallum" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 4:59 PM
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Fuzzy Logic in Ecology
Maybe this will help...
Imagine you have two people sitting at a table drinking and you are
the waiter/waitress.
One customer says, "I have 13.21435343234 ml of alchohol in my drink."
The other says, "My drink is low."
Which is more meaningful??? When the first person makes their
statement, do you really know what it means? You will need a lot more
information to assess what it means such as: how big is their glass,
how much ice is in it, was it a mixed drink?
The second person has relayed a very useful statement that tells you
exactly what is meant, however, you do not know how much it will take
to fill the drink.
The first example would be a standard estimate such as probability.
It seeks to get to the exact number of concern.
The second exaple is a fuzzy estimate, and provides a cognitive
estimate that has obvious meaning but will need further investigation
to work out the details.
Standard estimates deal with what is probable.
Fuzzy estimates deal with what is possible.
does that make sense?
