The rapid growth of the group suggests that the impact of soft computing on science and technology will be increasingly felt in coming years. While traditional or hard computing uses crisp values, or numbers, soft computing deals with soft values, or fuzzy sets. Soft computing is capable of operating with uncertain, imprecise and incomplete information in a manner that reflects human thinking. In real life, humans normally use soft data represented by words rather than numbers. Our sensory organs deal with soft information, our brain makes soft associations and inferences in uncertain and imprecise environments, and we have a remarkable ability to reason and make decisions without using numbers.
Humans use words, and soft computing attempts to model our sense of words in decision making.
Certainly words are less precise than numbers, but precision carries a high cost. We use words when there is a tolerance for imprecision. Likewise, soft computing exploits the tolerance for uncertainty and imprecision to achieve greater tractability and robustness, and lower the cost of solutions. We also use words when the available data is not precise enough to use numbers. This is often the case with complex problems, and while hard computing fails to produce any solution, soft computing is still capable of finding good solutions.