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by regularfry 1113 days ago
The 0..1 of fuzzy logic isn't the 0..1 of probability. When, in fuzzy logic, you say "X is true to degree 0.7" you are not saying "70% of the time, X is true" or "70% of samples display X"[0]. You are saying that the state you observe conforms to X by 70%. You can, at the same time, say "Y is true to degree 0.4". X and Y are allowed be somewhat contradictory: there's no need for their degrees to sum to 1.

[0] Not necessarily. You might choose to measure X that way, but it's not required.

1 comments

You'll need to be more specific, because probability can be described the same way, numerically.
Fuzzy logic deals with degrees/scores, probability theory deals with how likely something is.

When you say that "The hotel room is 75% clean", that's a degree. It means a room that's not as clean as a "90% clean" hotel room, but definitely cleaner than a "50% clean" hotel room on some kind of cleanliness scale that you have. You need a scale because the boundary between clean and unclean is not sharp, but fuzzy. Fuzzy logic gives you tools to construct well-behaved scales for logical combinations of variables that already have scales associated with them. E.g. if you have a scale for a motorcycle being loud and a scale for a motorcycle being expensive (both fuzzy concepts), the tools of fuzzy logic can e.g. give you a scale for loud OR expensive.

In contrast, when you say that "The hotel room is clean with probability 75%", you're reasoning about how likely it is that the room is clean under uncertainty. Maybe the cleaners only work 3 out of 4 days, and you're unsure what day it is. But these are not degrees of cleanliness: if you say that a room has a 75% chance of being clean you're not claiming that it's cleaner than some other room that has a 50% chance of being clean.

The concepts involved in probability need not be fuzzy, or even measured on a scale. E.g. when one says "there's a 75% chance that the car repair will cost more than $50", there is no fuzziness involved in whether the repair costs more than $50 or not: in the end, you'll get a bill, and it will state a number that is unambiguously either above $50 or not above $50, a pure binary variable, no scales involved.

A simple example I once heard was,

Probability: “There’s a 70% chance the grass will be wet tomorrow morning”

Fuzzy logic: “The grass will be 70% wet tomorrow morning”