Introduction to Soft Computing

Soft computing (SC) is a branch, in which, it is tried to build intelligent and wiser machines. Intelligence provides the power to derive the answer and not simply arrive to the answer. Purity of thinking, machine intelligence, freedom to work, dimensions, complexity and fuzziness handling capability increase, as we go higher and higher in the hierarchy as shown in Fig. 1.1. The final aim is to develop a computer or a machine which will work in a similar way as human beings can do, i.e. the wisdom of human beings can be replicated in computers in some artificial manner.

Intuitive consciousness/wisdom is also one of the important area in the soft computing, which is always cultivated by meditation. This is indeed, an extraordinary challenge and virtually a new phenomenon, to include consciousness into the computers.

Soft computing is an emerging collection of methodologies, which aim to exploit tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, and partial truth to achieve robustness, tractability and total low cost. Soft computing methodologies have been advantageous in many applications. In contrast to analytical methods, soft computing methodologies mimic consciousness and cognition in several important respects: they can learn from experience; they can universalize into domains where direct experience is absent; and, through parallel computer architectures that simulate biological processes, they can perform mapping from inputs to the outputs faster than inherently serial analytical representations. The trade off, however, is a decrease in accuracy. If a tendency towards imprecision could be tolerated, then it should be possible to extend the scope of the applications even to those problems where the analytical and mathematical representations are readily available. The motivation for such an extension is the expected decrease in computational load and consequent increase of computation speeds that permit more robust system (Jang et al. 1997).