When I was in school, studying electrical engineering, I really liked digital stuff. Everything was a zero or a one. I really didn’t like analog stuff. And then there was that semi-conductive material. It all just made my brain hurt. Give me zeros and ones anyday.

I think I can work with an equation for the value of mobility if I only have to deal with ones and zeros (either “fully available” or “not fully available”). Don’t bog me down with realities like battery life, roaming, voice but not data coverage, 1xRTT but not EV-DO, no connection but synced data on my device, etc.

Did Gordon and Bob have to deal with this stuff?

But in reality, I will adjust my behavior and thus derive different utility depending on my knowledge of the relative battery life. If I am away from a recharger and I know my battery is running low, I might refrain from making a marginal call or using a marginal service.

Thus there may be a fuzzy frontier of utility between a fully charged battery and a fully discharged one.

My understanding of fuzzy logic is still rudimentary, but I believe it is a modification to traditional set theory which acknowedges that a given element can be a partial element of a set (as opposed to the traditional binary logic of sets.)

Thus at any given time a device can be a part of the set “accessible” and yet partially “inaccesible” (it contains its own negation).

Determining the exact contours between these two sets is where fuzzy engineers seem to spend a great deal of their time. While fuzzy logic is still a rather new discipline I understand it is already finding many practical uses in consumer electronics and AI research.