Soft computing ideas can help earthquake geophysics

Earthquakes can be devastating, thus it is important to gain a good understanding of the corresponding geophysical processing. One of the challenges in geophysics is that we cannot directly measure the corresponding deep-earth quantities, we have to rely on expert knowledge, knowledge which often comes in terms of imprecise ( fuzzy ) words from natural language. To formalize this knowledge, it is reasonable to use techniques that were speci cally designed for such a formalization namely, fuzzy techniques, In this paper, we formulate the problem of optimally representing such knowledge. By solving the corresponding optimization problem, we conclude that the optimal representation involves using piecewise-constant functions. For geophysics applications, this means that we need to go beyond tectonic plates to explicitly consider parts of the plates that move during the earthquake. We argue that such an analysis will lead to a better understanding of earthquake-related geophysics.