Book excerpt: Ever since fuzzy logic was introduced by Lotfi Zadeh in the mid-sixties and genetic algorithms by John Holland in the early seventies, these two fields widely been subjects of academic research the world over. During the last few years, they have been experiencing extremely rapid growth in the industrial world, where they have been shown to be very effective in solving real-world problems. These two substantial fields, together with neurocomputing techniques, are recognized as major parts of soft computing: a set of computing technologies already riding the waves of the next century to produce the human-centered intelligent systems of tomorrow; the collection of papers presented in this book shows the way. The book also contains an extensive bibliography on fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms.