Soft Computing (SC) is a relatively new paradigm in the field of computing. It attempts to model human cognition in software systems. Soft computing is likely to play a significant role in science, engineering and business in future. Developers should embrace it to showcase software systems that are supposed to display human-like intelligence through learning from environment. This article provides useful insights into soft computing and its constituent technologies to develop intelligent systems.

The past 50 years of research in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made significant incremental advances on a broad front. It is admitted that all the promises that were made during the early days of development of this technology could not be kept in subsequent days. But it is true that today’s computing systems do provide impressive levels of machine intelligence. We have software systems that are at par with human capabilities. These software systems recognize and understand human speech, sense environment and act accordingly, undertake complex analytical and diagnostic tasks and many more. Recent “Mars Exploration” by NASA (National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration) with the help of geologist robots, Spirit and Opportunity is a great achievement in this field.

AI is now a part of our daily lives. Industrial robots employing AI technologies are very common in automatic manufacturing and quality control applications. Speech recognition and synthesis technologies are used in banks and other business areas to handle a large number of customers daily. AI technology is successfully tested in prediction and data mining tasks. A washing machine that exploits fuzzy logic control can determine what type of fabric is being washed to set the correct wash cycle. A refrigerator decides how long it should defrost if the food kept inside it is frozen. Although the use of AI is now quite widespread, building a truly intelligent system is still a challenging task before the developer’s community. Of late, soft computing approach is exploited in building intelligent systems. Soft computing attempts to emulate the human mind as closely as possible. As the popularity of soft computing increases we will find developers to apply it to build intelligent software systems more and more.

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