In computer science, soft computing or computational intelligence is the use of inexact solutions to computationally hard tasks such as the solution of NP-complete problems, for which there is no known algorithm that can compute an exact solution in polynomial time. Soft computing differs from conventional (hard) computing in that, unlike hard computing, it is tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation. In effect, the role model for soft computing is the human mind.

The principal constituents of Soft Computing (SC) are Fuzzy Logic (FL), Evolutionary Computation (EC), Machine Learning (ML) and Probabilistic Reasoning (PR), with the latter subsuming belief networks and parts of learning theory.