For those bemused at how a vacuum cleaner can benefit from the ministrations of fuzzy logic (CI No 1,584), the Nippon Keizai Shimbun explains that Hitachi’s new product – due to ship at the end of the month for the equivalent of $1,100 – adjusts the functions of power brushes according to the nature of the surface being vacuumed, saving electricity by controlling the total electric current needed. Hitachi is not the first to add fuzzy logic control circuitry to a vacuum cleaner – Matsushita Electric Industrial Co has come out with a whole range of fuzzy appliances over the last nine months, including a vacuum cleaner, washing machine, video camera-recorder, heater, rice cooker, dishwasher, and clothes dryer. And Sharp, Mitsubishi Electric, Sanyo and Sony are also players in the fuzzy consumer market, with products that have been under development for five years. What all these appliances have in common is that they run more economically than conventional models because they are capable of adapting to their environments.
Fuzzy dishwasher
A fuzzy dishwasher, for example, can detect how many dishes have been loaded and how encrusted they are, and vary the soap and water amounts and cycle time accordingly; a fuzzy heater adjusts to the size of a room and the number of people in it; a fuzzy video camera compensates for changes in light and for hand shake; and fuzzy televisions adjust in brightness according to the light in the room, and increase volume as the viewer moves away from the set. According to the Japanese business daily, the fancy-priced Hitachi product is targeted at wealthy middle-aged people with nothing better to spend their money on, from which one might conclude that the Japanese are producing these extravagant appliances just for the fun of exploiting the rich. But, not so – they take the technology very seriously and, according to the Washington Post, the fuzzy products are selling like hot cakes in Japan. The Japanese dazzled the Americans with their fuzzy appliances at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month – but needless to say they were only bringing it all back home: it was of course the Americans that invented the technology.
It was conceived in America but never found its way down from rarefied technical applications. In contrast, in Japan, consumer goods featuring fuzzy logic are bursting out all over. Susan Norris tells the story. -Lofti Zadeh of the University of California at Berkeley was the initiator of the fuzzy logic concept back in the 1960s, when he discovered that computer logic didn’t have to be restricted to the two truth values 0 and 1. In fuzzy logic, an infinite range of truth values exists between 0 and 1, enabling any number of continuous mathematical functions to be handled. This capability effectively enables machines to be programmed to handle human concepts such as almost and not quite. But, whereas in Japan fuzzy logic has been brought straight to the consumer market in down-to-earth applications, in the US and Europe the use of the technology has in the main been restricted to scientific laboratories for artificial intelligence research. One US company that is exclusively devoted to developing fuzzy logic technology is Westlake Village, California-based Togai Infralogic Inc, which was set up by two researchers from AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in the early 1980s to develop a fuzzy logic controller board, and in 1989 launched a fuzzy logic-based developmental co-processor – the FC110. This artificial intelligence processor can be embedded into commercial products – the National Aeronautics & Space Administration has been experimenting with Togai’s fuzzy logic packages on space flight control problems. More recently, Togai introduced an accelerator board designed for Unix-based fuzzy-processing applications. Another US company that pioneered fuzzy matching was Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Excalibur Technology, in which McDonnell Douglas Information Systems took a 25% stake after it developed something called the Savvy Board in the early 1980s. The Sav
vy Board was designed to enable novices to use personal computers effectively: each letter and space in an input phrase is treated as if it were a bar in a bar graph, and a logical line is traced along the tops of the bars the nearest match is then located in memory, enabling users to access the right response even when they have wrongly phrased or mis-spelled a command. The Savvy Board found a niche in the market when Nikkei Information Systems signed the company to develop a Japanese-language text recognition and retrieval system.
Fuzzy ventures
Excalibur has also developed pattern recognition products, used for in the oil industry for field exploration, and integrated electronic filing systems for text and images. But, as yet there is still no sign of the American fuzzy consumer appliance. Last autumn, however, a new venture capital company – Fuzzy Venture Partners – was established in the US to provide start-up funding for new companies wanting to develop fuzzy logic-based products. Besides the fact that the US won’t want to be outdone by the Japanese, this financial incentive could be the final push the US needs to uncover its own fuzzy contenders for the consumer market. The venture company, in which Lofti Zadeh is a special limited partner, reckons the fuzzy logic industry could soon be worth between $2,000m and $3,000m a year.
