I've had a book on fuzzy logic sitting on my shelf for the last several months and finally got around to looking at it. The book is:
Fuzzy Logic
A Practical Approach
P. Margin McNeill and Ellen Thro
AP Professional, 1994, ISBN 0-12-485965-8
It comes with a crippled but functional fuzzy logic development system authored by P. McNeill.
The system is targeted for Windows 3.1 It contains a "Fuzzy Calculator", "Fuzzy Thought Amplifier", "Fuzzy Decision Maker" and "Fuzzy Knowledge Builder". You can create fuzzy systems for either business or control systems. The authors describe the various objectives of business oriented fuzzy/expert systems in very clear point form method.
The software is outstanding. Unbelievable for the purpose of educating people on fuzzy systems. The basic theoretical text leaves a little to be desired unfortunately, so a beginner still needs another reference such as Cox's or Klir's book (which is in great detail). But the software is absolutely dynamite and I wish to hell I had this book several years ago. The software shows inferencing in operation and gives 3d plots of the contour surface among other gradient displays.
Some annoying mouse work has to be done to change the values of fuzzy sets, but other than that it is absolutely incredible in a "free" software format. A breakthrough.
I am still playing with it and love it. I already know most of what is in the book but the sheer pleasure of displaying inferencing graphically and tweaking the knowledge base so easily and effortlessly drives me to explore it further.
You can output code in 'C', Intel, Motorola among other items. Not all are available in the demo version.
The authors separate fuzzy control systems from business systems very well. They differentiate between decision making systems, systems for modelling complex scenarios and rule based fuzzy expert systems. For business and management systems they describe the categories as: prescriptive, descriptive , optimizing, satisficing and predictive. They even give a beginners look at what Kosko's fuzzy hypercubes are about. To top it off they include inference engines in 'C' and QuickBasic.
The book is pretty brief over some details. If I did not know what center of gravity was I would not have known what they were talking about. But it is another example of a book that has great concepts and besides these; the software is just wonderful. It makes me wonder why I didn't just pick up Visual Basic and do the same thing...
Well worth the 40 or 50 bucks. This thing will teach you fuzzy logic in a few days or less if you have already done the basic fuzzy math theory. An engineering student can do it all in a couple of days - no problem.
So my all time fuzzy books:
Fuzzy Sets, Uncertainty and Information by Klir and Folger,
Fuzzy Handbook by Cox,
Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic Applications by Welstead,
and lastly
Fuzzy Logic, a Practical Approach by McNeill and Thro.
If anyone has comments on these selections or additions, please post them.
BTW, You HAVE to know C for Welstead's book, it is not really for beginner C programmers.
Regards, Wolly
BTW a previous post from someone mentioned Tim Masters book on Neural Nets
that include Fuzzy logic, though not in the title. He has a couple of
books on Neural Nets - all excellent. Really really good.
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