At the beginning of the new millennium, fuzzy logic opens a new challenging perspective in information processing. This perspective emerges out of the ideas of the founder of fuzzy logic - Lotfi Zadeh, to develop 'soft' tools for direct computing with human perceptions.
The book focuses on both the engineering applications of fuzzy logic and soft computing and its social applications and philosophical insights at the dawn of the third millennium. The included papers clearly demonstrate that fuzzy logic revolutionizes general approaches to solving applied problems and reveals deep connections between those approaches and the underlying unique theoretical framework. The book consists of three parts: Understanding Society, Mathematics, and Modelling and Control Systems. The first part reveals different aspects of fuzziology, a new study of fuzziness inherent in human knowledge. The second part explores the mathematical foundations of soft computing, while the third part elicits its innovative engineering applications.