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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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The brittleness problem

Expert systems had a fatal flaw.

Outside their rules, they didn't say "I don't know." They answered anyway, confidently, incorrectly. Ask MYCIN about a broken arm, and it would produce something that sounded medical but was nonsense. The system had no sense of its own limits. It knew what it knew, and nothing told it where that ended.

This wasn't a bug. It was a consequence of how these systems were built: lists of rules, with no underlying understanding of what those rules were actually about.

Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. shortliffe.net
  2. 2. computerhistory.org