On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Morten W. Petersen wrote:
I do not think that "fuzzy logic" is strongly related to "regexp-like". Anyway.
Fuzzy searching often means "finding matches with characters omitted, replaced or inserted".
It seems I misunderstood the term fuzzy logic myself. Fuzzy logic means if I search for a word, for example 'programmer', it will return matches to the words 'program', 'programming','programmable' etc.
I think your talking about something else. Last i checked, "fuzzy logic" was a logical algebra based on the existence of intermediate truth states, between "true" and "false". It has little or nothing to do with aproximate searching, though i guess you could use it to make assertions about the aproximations. I think what you all are talking about is "fuzzy matching".
I.e., it will somewhat intelligently return words that are similar in what they mean, using grammar rules (chopping off endings of words and making them match others).
There are also matching mechanisms like soundex, that account for misspelling by translating words to phonetic-equivalent normalized codes, and comparing on that basis. Ken klm@digicool.com