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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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A quieter failure

The second winter was nothing like the first.

There was no Lighthill Report. No single announcement, no moment of reckoning. Just a slow accumulation: maintenance bills that kept climbing, systems that failed outside their narrow areas, hardware markets that collapsed, funding that went elsewhere.

Company by company, project by project, the recognition spread that the approach had fundamental limits. The brittleness wasn't a fixable bug. It was a consequence of how knowledge actually works.

Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org
  2. 2. smbx.org