[pjbk]

Back in the 90s when neural networks and fuzzy logic were the rage and were going to solve all problems of human mankind (déjà vu?), I stumbled upon this nice course put together by Texas A&M in the form of an "ebook" (aka Win3.1 application). Lofti Zadeh himself was a contributor. I looked it up in my bookmarks and I cannot believe that the site is still up:

http://faculty.petra.ac.id/resmana/private/fuzzy

I was very interested in training neural networks to find out optimal fuzzy parameters for robotic control systems as an alternative to gain scheduling. There were some cool small companies making nifty scientific apps that I remember evaluating (Aptronix and Neuralogix come to my mind).

[badsectoracula]

Out of curiosity i downloaded and downloaded the tutorial and it looks to be more of a hyperlinked multimedia(ish) application, similar to something you'd see made in Hypercard (which makes sense since it seems to be made in ToolBook which essentially was a Hypercard clone for Windows 3.1) and less of something like a PDF, something you'd see in an Amazon Kindle or something you'd see as an EPUB (which is what i think most people would associate with ebooks nowadays).

I made a quick capture under VBox with Windows 3.1 for others to see, (though i think it should also work under Wine and otya128's winevdm port to Windows 10):

http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/nyan/gimme/webm/fuz...

EDIT: i started reading it now for real and i have to say it is a very interesting way to teach. In theory the hyperlinked approach would work fine in the web, but i cannot think of anything similar in practice. The closest i can think of was some interactive examples in a blog post i found some years ago about making a 2D game.

[pjbk]

Pre-powerpoint app presentations were popular back in the days. In the 80s I recall there was a huge industry of educational presentations for 8-bit Commodore and Atari machines. Some good, some bad, and some very bad. There were a few that were interactive and "hyperlinked". In particular I learned programming Atari ANTIC display lists and players & missiles with one that allowed you to modify things in an editor/debugger in realtime so you could immediately see the changes in the graphics, and also checked your correct responses at the end in the self-evaluation section. Pretty awesome. I wonder if they used an external software to program that or they just did everything themselves, as it was usually done then.

I just downloaded DosBox, installed Win3.1 and the software. I am having a blast down memory lane. It's impressive how your brain can retrieve memories so well with only minimal hints after more than 20 years... the persistence of memory!

[aasasd]

I've seen stuff like that back in the early- to mid-2000s. It seems, of course, that most of such ‘multimedia programs’ were educational packages for kids.

But most of all, this reminds me of PowerPoint presentations, which iirc were sometimes similarly made for use at home and with educational content. Also olde .HLP and .CHM ‘books’ were employed in this vein.

[badsectoracula]

I guess you could make something similar with PowerPoint and "jump to slide" actions and VBA macros, but i haven't seen any HLP or CHM (even though CHM could technically do it via JavaScript) that work like that.

Still, what i found interesting was mainly the way this was presented in bite-sized pieces (via the pages that couldn't arbitrarily extend via scrolling), combined with clear graphs/pictures and interactivity (not just hyperlinking, but also end-of-chapter quizzes and in a couple of cases showing values changing live as you move your mouse over them).

Technically simple stuff, of course, and certainly done before (i mean, ToolBook was made in 1989 and is still around, so chances are someone is using it :-P), but not something i see often, which seems to be a shame. I had only heard the name "fuzzy logic" before, but after reading that presentation (just the fundamentals) i got a decent idea about what they are and it was easy to follow the tutorial. In comparison the same URL has a bunch of PDFs, including a text-only tutorial that seemed to describe more or less the same stuff. However i could only glaze over before closing it since i just couldn't focus on it. The interactive stuff is just so much more attractive :-P

[jacques_chester]

Also available as a free textbook: Fuzzy Control by Passino & Yurkovich - http://www2.ece.ohio-state.edu/~passino/FCbook.pdf

I recently read Fuzzy Logic with Engineering Applications by Ross. Helpful and interesting, though he does tend to occasionally spend pages performing every step of a calculation.