Expert System

The goal of this lecture is to clarify
Basic concepts behind expert systems
knowledge representation,
inference mechanisms,
problem solving.
techniques (knowledge engineering, rapid prototyping) used to construct expert systems,
tools used to construct expert systems.

According to Darlington:
“An expert system is a program that attempts to mimic human expertise by applying inference methods to a specific body of knowledge.”
According to Turban:
“An expert system is a system that employs human knowledge captured in a computer to solve problems that ordinarily require human expertise.”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the part of computer science concerned with designing intelligent computer systems, that is, systems that exhibit the characteristics we associate with intelligence in human behavior – understanding language, learning reasoning, solving problems and so on.

Barr and Feigenbaum, 1981

Initially, attempts were made to make computers ‘intelligent’ in a general way.
In 1960s Allan Newell and Herbert Simon wrote computer programs to test the hypothesis that intelligent behavior resulted from heuristic search.