Fuzzy logic makes a comeback – in picking where Earth sticks its probes into alien worlds

MIT boffins reckon they can use old-school artificial intelligence to do much of the grunt work in the tricky task of picking suitable landing spots for spacecraft. The software uses fuzzy logic algorithms, which were introduced in the 1960s and were rather trendy in the 1990s. "Traditionally this idea comes from mathematics, where instead of saying an element belongs to a set, yes or no, fuzzy logic says it belongs with a certain probability, thus reflecting incomplete or imprecise information," Victor Pankratius, coauthor of the paper and a research scientist and principal investigator in NASA and National Science Foundation projects at MIT, explained this week. NASA and other space agencies have slowly amassed troves of geographical data on Mars. The researchers reckon that NASA has over 100 Terabits from all the different orbiters, landers, and rovers sent to the Red Planet, but it's still not enough to completely determine the exact conditions on the ground there.