Coping with the imprecision of the real world

Abstract

Q. Professor Zadeh, in this interview today, you agreed to talk mainly about the limits of traditional logic in dealing with many of the problems in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and your approach toward helping to overcome those difficulties. Before getting into those issues, though, could you first give our readers a brief overview of what you see as the major areas for computer applications in the years ahead? ZADEH. In the years ahead, there will be three major areas of computer applications. One, in the traditional vein, is the use of computers for purposes of numerical analysis. Numerical analysis will be very important in a number of fields--particularly in scientific computations and simulation of large-scale systems. For such purposes, there will be a need for larger and larger computers. This is especially true for applications in meteorology, in nuclear physics, in modeling of large-scale economic systems, in the solution of partial differential equations, and in the simulation of complex phenomena like turbuldnce, fluid flow, etc. Area number two will be concerned with masses of data--large databases. This is the sort of thing that is playing and will be playing an important role in banking, insurance, records processing, information retrieval, etc. What will be important in these areas is not so much number-crunching capabilities as the capability to store massive amounts of data and to access whatever data are needed rapidly and at a reasonably low cost. Furthermore, in these areas, computer networking, of course, will be playing an essential role. For you will have to have access not just to a single database but to a collection of interconnected databases. In response to this need, we will see many advances in computer networking during the next several years. The third major area for computer applications is what has come to be known as knowledge engineering. This area has received considerable publicity during the past few years, particularly since the Japanese have