What happens when you let a computer say 'sort of' instead of just 'yes' or 'no'?

The answer

Fuzzy logic, introduced by Lotfi Zadeh at UC Berkeley in his 1965 paper 'Fuzzy Sets,' extends classical Boolean logic by allowing truth values to range continuously between 0 and 1 rather than being strictly true or false. This lets systems handle vague, imprecise concepts like 'warm,' 'fast,' or 'somewhat tall' - the way humans naturally reason. Japan embraced fuzzy logic in the late 1980s, embedding it in consumer products: Hitachi built the Sendai subway system (1987) with fuzzy controllers for smoother braking, and Matsushita's fuzzy washing machines could automatically adjust cycles based on load dirtiness. By 1990, the Japanese fuzzy logic market exceeded $2 billion, though the approach was initially met with skepticism in the West, where researchers debated whether it was a genuine advance or simply a rebranding of probability theory.