“Ang hirap kasi sa yo binary ka mag-isip.”

“Eh bakit ba … eh ikaw ang fuzzy ng logic mo.”

I’ve always been a fan of Binary Logic. In it, you only worry about the 1 and the 0, the BLACK and the WHITE, the TRUE and the FALSE, the YES and the NO. I like reducing everything to two states. I hate gray areas. I hate in-betweens. I can’t help it, I’m like wired that way.

There are lots of advantages to using Binary Logic like ease of design, ease of computation et cetera et cetera (am too woozy to think of other examples right now so y’all have to just accept that haha). But *le sigh* ultimately, we live in an analog world and in an analog world, most of the information is contained in the in-between parts. And according to my college thesis adviser, “in RF, there is no black or white, only gray”. I frikkin dealt with sinusoids (argh) in RF for quite some time and I still don’t like them. There is comfort in gradual and curvy change though, as opposed to the sudden drops and ascents of binary graphs (a square wave, for example). But this is getting away from the point — wait, what point am I making anyway? I can’t frikkin’ remember.

Anyway, back to Binary Logic. As I said earlier, it only has two states. When you plot it, it would look like this:

Hmmm. Now let’s say we’re trying to categorize a (hmmm, pick an object/animal other than cat — I don’t like cats) …okay, let’s say a TURTLE. The Y-Axis contains two values — 1 and 0 only, 1 for HEAVY while 0 for LIGHT. An average adult turtle grows to about 200 lbs. So say we define that as heavy. That means if TURTLE-001 is 201 lbs, TURTLE-001 is heavy, while TURTLE-002 (199.9 lbs) will be light. That doesn’t reflect how people normally think, right?

Now, if we draw the same graph this way:

There is no sharp boundary here, only a smooth transition. And the Y-Axis would have values between 0 and 1, like 0.1, 0.2, … , 0.9. So, 199.9 lbs would correspond to some value in the X-axis and the 201 lbs as well. That is what we call a FUZZY interpretation of the previous plot.

Fuzzy Logic is a form of multi-valued logic derived from Fuzzy Set theory that deals with reasoning that is approximate rather than precise. “Approximate” here would attribute to linguistic expressions such as “almost”, “slightly”, “quite”, just like for the turtle example above, “quite heavy” or “pretty heavy” or “really light”. Fuzzy logic deals with degrees of membership to a certain state blah-blah-blah.

So what now?

Haha, actually … I don’t know. I’m still a fan of Binary Logic. It’s still YES or NO, BLACK or WHITE, 1 or 0 for me. Sidenote: now I know why I like two-colored patterns like checkered and stripes. Anyway, so Binary Logic is still the shit. But after I got told that I think way too binary logical, I have been thinking that maybe, just maybe, Fuzzy Logic, as a way to look at things, certainly has some merits. I dunno, maybe I should consider the fact that the value I’m looking for is 0.5298723 and it’s neither 0 or 1 (do not tell me about floors and ceilings and rounding-off, please), that instead of checkered or alternating stripes, gradient can also be beautiful to look at, and that instead of a YES or a NO, there is such a thing called MAYBE.

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Sabi nga ni Katie Noonan sa kanyang kantang “Logic”:

Coz logic goes out the window when I look at you
Reason has no reason to be there …

PS — Gumawa pa ng kung anu-anong post para lang i-intro-han ang kanta ni Katie Noonan eh :p