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The Expert Systems Era

  1. 01The Expert Systems Era
  2. 02Rules as intelligence
  3. 03MYCIN and the diagnosis machine
  4. 04The expert systems boom
  5. 05The brittleness problem
  6. 06The maintenance burden
  7. 07The LISP machine collapse
  8. 08A quieter failure
  9. 09Reinforce your understanding
  10. 10Question: expert systems
  11. 11Question: brittleness
  12. 12Question: Maintenance
  13. 13Quiz: answer
  14. 14Rules have limits
  15. 15Want to go deeper?
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Rules as intelligence

After the first winter, a simpler idea emerged.

Don't teach machines to reason from scratch. Give them rules. Find the experts, the doctors and engineers and scientists who had spent decades mastering a domain, and extract what they knew into a form a machine could follow.

It seemed more manageable than chasing general intelligence. Focus on one domain. Do it well. It was a narrower bet, and for a while, it paid off.

Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. computerhistory.org
  2. 2. cambridge.org