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Comment on Ask HN: What happened to fuzzy logic?

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I've built digital systems based on Fuzzy Logic in the US sometime in the mid 1990s. Fuzzy was good because it allowed us to implement very complex decision making (outcomes, classification...) on very, very basic hardware. It was, in all forms, a simplification of a neural net which was much harder to implement hardware-wise.

Fuzzy didn't go very far because it could already be implemented back then with cheap processors (we had Moore's law!) and some slap-on programming. Or domain-specific logic hardwired by engineers who knew what the outcome should be given a bunch of inputs: think "balancing robot" or washing machine torque control.

Modern ML and powerful Arduinos make fuzzy logic irrelevant today, except that Markov chains should also be irrelevant but they aren't, so who knows, maybe fuzzy could stage a come back. Despite its huge limitations, FL certainly is better than current neural nets when it comes to transparency so that humans can better visualize what it's doing. Disclaimer: back in the day I built a "FL tracker" in Visual Basic so that you could visualize the full system trickle-down a decision in realtime and it was very enlightening. Today I'd love to build the same visualizaer but for LLM generation!

Why do you say Markov chains should be irrelevant? Outclassed by NN?

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