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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 maintenance burden

Even within their domains, expert systems became expensive to keep alive.

Every new case required new rules. Rules conflicted with each other. Changing one broke three others. The engineers who built MYCIN described maintaining it as "painting a bridge": by the time you finished one end, the other end needed repainting.

The knowledge didn't transfer either. A system built for diagnosing infections couldn't be adapted for diagnosing engine faults. Each new domain meant starting over entirely.

Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. britannica.com
  2. 2. plato.stanford.edu