A discipline situated at the confluence of distinct methodologies: fuzzy logic, neural network, and probabilistic reasoning, the latter including evolutionary algorithms, chaos theory, belief networks and, though only partially, learning theory. Soft computing differs from conventional (hard) computing in that, unlike hard computing, it is tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty, and partial truth.
Published in Chapter:
The Virtual Identity, Digital Identity, and Virtual Residence of the Digital Citizen
Fortunato Sorrentino (Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 8
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-845-1.ch108
Abstract
Since cyberspace appeared (Gibson, 1984), our existence has been endowed of a new dimension: “the virtual”. This new “space”, open to many interpretations, has been recognized as a philosophical category, becoming a subject of passionate speculation by many thinkers: Deleuze, Lévy, De Kerkchove, Maldonado— to cite just a few of the recent ones, but one could recede even to Aristotle and Plato. However, if we leave the conceptual level, we realize that today “the virtual” exists for us because something very real exists and is surrounding us: technologies. We shall discuss this view and the effect that “the virtual” and the technologies associated with it have produced on us: the birth of three new attributes for any individual living in the digital society, a person’s virtual identity, digital identity and virtual residence.