Gating circuits that can implement Boolean logic have been in existence for over half a century, and have provided the backbone for classification and decision-making for countless numbers of computational systems. However, the requirement to satisfy truth tables that allow only dichotomous alternatives, e.g., True/False, greatly limits the situations in which these gating circuits can be used, or at least requires that the circuits be very complex.

In this article, Lane Yoder presents what appears to be a new class of logic gates that allows proportional activation of sensing elements to be formally transformed into proportional responses among a set of classifying elements. He specifies how the operational relations satisfy a truth table that provides for degrees of truth, i.e., with the value falling at intermediate positions between 0 and 1, and relates this to conventional concepts in fuzzy logic.

One cannot be completely certain that these gating operations have not been described previously. However, I have surveyed a number of scholars who are knowledgeable about electronic gating options, or information processing using Boolean or fuzzy logic, and have not found anyone who can point to a precedent. It appears that the Yoder gates are, indeed, new. They provide an expanded range of network tools for implementing complex classification and decision-making that has not been possible using standard logic gates.