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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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MYCIN and the diagnosis machine

The most celebrated example was MYCIN, built at in the early 1970s.

MYCIN diagnosed bacterial blood infections and recommended antibiotics. It didn't learn or reason like a doctor. It had a list of rules: if the patient has this symptom and that test result, then consider this infection. Follow the rules far enough and you get a diagnosis.

In a 1979 study, it outperformed many practicing physicians, including some faculty at Stanford's medical school. It was real, tested, and influential, though not routinely deployed in clinical practice.

Within its domain, following its rules, MYCIN was genuinely good at its job.

Citations(3)↓
  1. 1. archive.org
  2. 2. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  3. 3. shortliffe.net