Innovative design continues to exploit the power of neural and related techniques. Always more popular with Japanese and Pacific Rim consumer-product designers, fuzzy logic did not catch on to the ...

This article is published by AllBusiness.com, a partner of TIME. Fuzzy logic is a form of logic that extends traditional boolean logic by allowing for degrees of truth, rather than just true or false.

One night in July, 1964, the logician Lotfi Zadeh found himself alone in his parents’ New York apartment, his dinner plans cancelled. At the time, Zadeh later wrote, he was doing “a lot of thinking ...