Existing search engines have many remarkable capabilities. But what is not among them is deduction capability -- the capability to answer a query by drawing on information which resides in various parts of the knowledge base or is augmented by the user. An example of a simple query which cannot be answered by any existing search engine is: "How many UC Berkeley alumni were born in Calimation are crisp. In the queer "How Many UC Berkeley alumni are wealthy?" the query-relevant information is crisp but the query is fuzzy. The problem-- which is not widely recognized-- is that much of the information in the knowledge base of a search engine is perception-based. Methods based on divalent logic and standard probability theory lack capability to operate on perception-based information. A search engine with deduction capability is, in effect, a question-answering system.
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