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Introduction to Soft Computing and Its Types

Soft Computing | Introduction & Types: In this tutorial, we are going to discuss the Introduction of soft computing and also discuss the types of soft computing.
Submitted by Prerana Jain, on April 22, 2020

Computing

Any activity that uses computers to manage, process and communicate information is called computing. In 2005 ACM computing curricula defined "computing" as follow,

"In a general way, we can say that computing any goal-oriented activity that requires benefited from or creating computers. Thus designing and building hardware and software systems for many ranges of purposes, structuring and doing scientific studies using the computer and managing various types of information."

Types of Computing

There are mainly two types of computing,

1) Soft Computing

• Soft computing is just automating the process of computing. Hard computing means just dong computing according to your needs.
• The term soft computing is a new concept proposed by Professor Lottie Zadeh.
• The process of soft computing is to exploit the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth to obtain robustness, tractability, batter rapport with reality, and low solution cost.
• Soft computing is when a program learns its own but hard computing is when you tell the program to compute particular things.
• Soft computing means making the program that does not directly connect to hardware like a database.
• Soft computing is not just a homogenous body of concepts and techniques, rather it is a partnership of different methods.
• In soft computing, fuzzy logic is concerned with imprecision and appropriate reasoning neurocomputing with learning and curve-fitting probabilistic reasoning with uncertainty and belief propagation.
• Soft computing is a hybrid technique that uses a combination of NNs, GAs, and FL. Its goal is to match the human brain as near as possible.
• Soft computing is a process in which antecedent is given to a computing function and the output consequent is produced.
  
  Where f is the formal method / algorithms / mapping function.

2) Hard Computing

• It is mainly based on binary logic and a crisp system.
• Hard computing mainly works on exact input data.
• It is that ancient approach in computing that desires associate in the analytical model.
• Hard computing is not that capable to solve a real-life problem.
• It also needs a precise consecutive file.
• It is deterministic.

Difference between soft computing and hard computing

Hard Computing	Soft Computing
In hard computing, there is precision.	In soft computing, there is an imprecision.
It is based on binary logic and numerical analysis.	It is based on fuzzy logic neural network, evolutionary computation.
In this, there is no approximation.	In this, there is an approximation.
It has exact input data.	It deals with ambiguous noisy data.
Strictly sequential.	It allows parallel computation.
It is a set of programs to solve a particular problem.	Make a program and it automates the result, how the problem is solved.
It takes a lot of time for computation.	It takes less time because it works like the human brain.
It requires a program to be written.	It can evolve its program.

Applications of Soft Computing

• In solving the non-linear problem where the mathematical model is not possible.
• Introducing human knowledge such as cognition, data mining, and web mining.
• Global positioning system.
• Face recognition.
• Signature verification.
• Traveling salesman problem optimization
• Hybrid fuzzy controllers.