Lotfi Zadeh

Lotfi Zadeh, an electrical engineer in Southern California, calls this a "fuzzy" world we live in—a world where all the rules are "fuzzy logic." It's a gray, nebulous, world of shades and degrees. We buy sophisticated computer systems to help us price our product. But when it comes to pricing a job, there's no single "right" computer price. Our computers produce a nice, "crisp" number that we mark up and say, "This IS the price." Then we say, "Yeah, right," and proceed to bargain for some fuzzy value based on hunch and guess. We know that budgeted "costs" are just arbitrary fictions. We're groping.