I have just learned of Fuzzy Logic, bringing me to read the Wikipedia article on Bart Kosko and am struck by the familiarity of it all. Surely Bart Kosko is a character created by Flann OâBrien?
Evidence?
Here it is:
He is a leading researcher of fuzzy logic, neural networks, and noise, and author of several trade books and textbooks on these and related subjects..â?
Kosko has a distinctive minimalist prose style, not even using commas in his last several books.â?
Kosko holds degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics, electrical engineering, and law. He is an attorney licensed in California and federal court..â?
â¦at age 18, he won a scholarship in music composition to USC based on his orchestral âOverture to the Count of Monte Cristo,â? which he wrote the year before..â?
â¦he has published essays on âPalestinian vouchersâ? [6] and the experience of taking the infamous California bar examination..â?
In fuzzy logic, he introduced fuzzy cognitive maps, fuzzy subsethood, additive fuzzy systems, fuzzy approximation theorems, optimal fuzzy rules, fuzzy associative memories, various neural-based adaptive fuzzy systems, ratio measures of fuzziness, the shape of fuzzy sets, the conditional variance of fuzzy systems , and the geometric view of (finite) fuzzy sets as points in hypercubes and its relationship to the on-going debate of fuzziness versus probability.â?
I do not wish to be cruel or unfair to Bart Kosko, and plead doubt as to his existence to justify these remarks about him.
Furthermore, his exotic character is overshadowed by his area of expertise. Here is a quote on the subject:
Fuzzy logic in the narrow sense is symbolic logic with a comparative notion of truth developed fully in the spirit of classical logic (syntax, semantics, axiomatization, truth-preserving deduction, completeness, etc.; both propositional and predicate logic). It is a branch of many-valued logic based on the paradigm of inference under vagueness.â?
We are at the boundary where life imitates art.
I may come to regret this post; the sheer brass neck of some Irish legal practitioners in advancing preposterous positions will now have a whole field of study to keep them going for, oh, twenty years.