DDJ: Are you a Moslem?
LZ: I am not practicing. Let me explain something about my background. I am of Iranian descent, but I was born in the Soviet Union, not in Iran. My father was a correspondent for Iranian newspapers. So I was born there but was not a Soviet citizen. When I was ten, my family moved back to Iran.
I went through the first three grades of elementary school in the Soviet Union. That was at the height of antireligious propaganda. I was born in 1921, and we left for Iran in 1931. At that point in the Soviet Union, no one would dare admit that he or she believed in God. That would have been sort of, sort of…
DDJ: Suicide?
LZ: Suicide. No one would talk to you, no one would associate with you. That was the sort of environment in which I grew up in those particular years.
Then when my parents returned to Iran, they placed me in an American Presbyterian missionary school where we had chapel every day at 10 o'clock, if you can imagine the transition from the one environment to the other environment!
Then, after studying there for a few months, I had to leave the school because the Iranian government at that time was nationalistic, and a law was passed to the effect that you couldn't go to a school run by foreigners without first completing an elementary school [education] in Iran. So I had to move from that school to an Iranian school.
DDJ: This was in the time of Mohammed Reza's father?
LZ: Exactly. Now, at that time Iran was anticlerical. That's what many Americans don't realize because of the Iranian Revolution. But before the revolution, Iran was highly anticlerical country--many of the imams were in prison--but antisecular at that same time. In Iran, Islam was even then the state religion.
It was assumed that you were Moslem unless you declared otherwise. So, in that Iranian school, if a Christian were to visit the school, all the walls had to be washed. I experienced these extremes of fanaticism.
When I was at the University of Tehran later, there was only one professor who was known to go to a mosque. That was Bazargan, who later became premier. If you said that you were going to a mosque, people would laugh at you. That was essentially the spirit of the times.
As a result of being subjected to these different influences, I became tolerant of different points of view. Because these people believed passionately one thing, and these people believed passionately another, and they couldn't all be correct. I began to realize that people have these passionate beliefs in something because they are insulated from people who believe in something else, so it sort of feeds on itself.
DDJ: My question had been aimed at this: It seems that what you have been teaching for the last two decades, and then some, has been more accessible to people from certain backgrounds than from others. It doesn't seem to be merely a question of what programming discipline one comes from. Fuzzy logic seems to be more accessible to people of different cultures, certainly more accessible to the Japanese, and to the coterie of Iranian students and former Iranians that has formed around you in this country that seems to find these ideas very easily accessible. Do you think that there is anything in cultural makeup that would make fuzzy logic acceptable?
LZ: In part. But some people try to explain the whole thing from that particular angle. I would not go that far, but there is some truth to it, in the following sense: When you talk about such cultures, you are talking about old cultures. When you talk about western cultures, you are talking about young cultures. Young people tend to be more dogmatic in their views than old people, because when you grow older, you become more keenly aware of the fact that, well, this is true, and that is true. You become more willing to concede that truth is not a monopoly of some particular way of thinking.
The thing to remember is that all traditions have a certain amount of validity, and beyond that point, they may become wrong or counterproductive. In this quest for precision, which is very characteristic of western culture, that's where fuzzy logic enters the picture. I say "Stop, maybe you should get off the train. Maybe it's not taking you to the solution to your problem. You have to reexamine things." And that is why some people become upset about this.
DDJ: You're introducing a degree of uncertainty into their life.
LZ: That's right. You're saying their goals may not be realizable. These views were expressed by Professor Kahan during my lecture: "We need more precision, more logic." He's a mathematician. I have very great admiration for him. You can see a forceful expression of that kind of thinking in him, and I agree that we need this expression, because it is precisely there that I disagree. I say that that kind of thinking has its place, but it also has its limits.
DDJ: It seems to presuppose that man has a godlike power to determine, incontrovertibly, the truth or error of a proposition.
LZ: What I'm very conscious of is that there are many things people accept without question, even though those things don't make any sense. They accept it because it's part of the tradition. I have many transparencies that I use in my lectures that illustrate how people come up [with] very precise conclusions on the basis of data which are completely unreliable.
Just to give you an example, there was a study made on the effect of removing lead from gasoline. The conclusion: "The removal of lead from gasoline will result in 1223 fewer cases of high blood pressure and 237 fewer cases of this_." It doesn't make any sense. How can you determine these things with such accuracy? Predictions of AIDS that by 1998 there will be so many cases of AIDS. How can you say this? People accept these things, because that is the tradition. You're supposed to swallow such assertions.
DDJ: Our society respects statistics as the ancient Babylonians respected the stars.
LZ: Given that it is respected, that's what people accept. Even if it doesn't make any sense.
JO: Scientists agree with Professor Zadeh. It's journalists who publish these numbers.
LZ: By the way, one of the interesting things we have looked at lately is establishing an "MIQ," a machine intelligence quotient.
DDJ: IQ is a measure that is determined by statistically analyzing those facts which are the common property of the civilization, and ranking people on the basis of what percentage [of] those cultural ideas the examinee is in possession of. How would one begin to establish a quotient on machines?
LZ: You have a standards committee. This standards committee considers various products and establish certain criteria. So there are dimensions to intelligence.
DDJ: Chess computers are rated these days.
LZ: So we would have to come up with a rating system agreed upon by a standards committee which can put its imprimatur upon the system. Many things are rated. Consumer Reports rates things.
DDJ: Once again you are proposing something that has tremendous commercial implication. Advertisers would love to say "Our washing machine has an MIQ of 190."
LZ: That is why I registered MIQ as a trademark! I hope to make some money out of this! I'm pretty sure that at some time in the future when you open Consumer Reports and read a report on washing machines, you'll see a column labeled, "MIQ." It's basically a measure of user-friendliness.
DDJ: You are reeducating America and Japan's young control engineers to a whole new paradigm of control engineering, yet you are in your seventies and show no sign of diminishing your activity.
LZ: Thank you. It's one of those situations where today I'm okay, and tomorrow I may be dead! Professor Kahan gave me this, which reads, "I hope you enjoy good health long enough to be invited to the White House to receive from the President a medal for so successfully distracting the Japanese for so long."
DDJ: Does Professor Kahan truly believe that you are leading the control industry astray?
LZ: I think so. I think he's very serious.
DDJ: Yet, in view of the vast commercial success of these products, how can an American argue with money?
LZ: We're very good friends. He is very sincere in his feelings that this whole thing is pernicious. Even if it became so ubiquitous that every product in Japan and the United States used fuzzy logic, he would still hold onto the opinion that it is wrong.
JO: Perhaps if you reassured him you would make no fuzzy-controlled nuclear bombs_.
LZ: (Laughs)
JO: But what if you proved that fuzzy logic works?
LZ: That's not good enough, because some people, not Professor Kahan, say that people aren't really using fuzzy logic, that it's just an advertising gimmick. Professor [John] MacCarthy at Stanford University makes that argument. Other people say that, well, yes they do use fuzzy logic, but they have not shown that they could not have attained this same result using standard methodology.
My response is "The Japanese, for instance, are not that stupid. If they could have achieved these things using standard techniques, why would they go into fuzzy logic?" It's not just a merchandising gimmick. You can't explain the whole thing by a merchandising gimmick.
The fuzzy-logic Sendai train started running in 1987. It's very successful. Now they're going to use it in Tokyo. A merchandising gimmick?
Next Month
In the next installment, Professor Zadeh discusses the Sendai train in detail and the Japanese approach to fuzzy logic. Then Professor Kahan arrives on the scene.
Jack is a frequent contributor to DDJ and can be contacted at [email protected].
