THE BIZ

Forget the sleek-chic ‘80s, Hollywood is going fuzzy. “Hammerheads,” a $15-million sci-fi epic directed by Avi Nesher, will be the first movie ever to incorporate the tenets and world view of fuzzy logic.

Fuzziness, readers may recall, is a system of mathematics that deals in matters of degree rather than yes/no certainties. USC electrical engineer Bart Kosko, the St. Paul of fuzziness, argues that it will fundamentally change, on the scientific level, the way the West regards reality.

Such claims appealed to Nesher, who signed on Kosko as a technical consultant for “Hammerheads,” a saga about a race of nano-engineered superpeople at the end of the 21st Century. “Fuzziness,” Nesher says, “gave a name and context to the kind of radical change I had hoped to depict. At some point, we will have to use genetic and nano-engineering techniques to become superhuman, eradicating many physical and mental flaws, or risk extinction.”

The word fuzzy is used in the film to describe how the robots combine the characteristics of human behavior with those of machines, and the process of making them that way. “The problem is that man is at once both a visceral and cerebral animal,” Nesher says. “ ‘Hammerhead’ is about the dichotomy between the two--how the flaws of being human get in the way of transcendence. Fuzziness, at a biological and psychological level, could provide a way out.”