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For a moment I thought this was making a parallel with 1980s "knowledge-base systems", which tried to make hay by piling up rules gleaned from experts. Those s

For a moment I thought this was making a parallel with 1980s "knowledge-base systems", which tried to make hay by piling up rules gleaned from experts. Those systems sort-of, kind-of worked, and got plenty of press, but vanished from the market without much of an obituary, or post-mortem exam, AFAIK. My guess is that they were impossible to maintain. I'm waiting to hear that the problem is now licked for the current crop.

tumba 9y ago
There are many rule-based expert systems in large scale use today. I know of applications in medicine, supply chain and logistics, and military.
- tjoff 9y ago
  Quite popular for airplane autopilots too (both manned an unmanned).
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> Those systems sort-of, kind-of worked, Rather more than that. For a famous example, check out the wikipedia article on MYCIN (a classic of the era): MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin There were many practical reasons why expert systems fell out of grace (although like others say they are still used widely, in real-world applications) but a large part of them was political, rather than anything to do with their effectiveness. Some historical background: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3454567_Avoiding_Another_AI_Winter https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3454567_Avoiding_An... In the end, the problem with expert systems was probably that they didn't scale as well as one would hope -primarily because it's damn hard to develop and maintain huge hand-crafted databases of knowledge solicited by experts who have very little incentive to collaborate in the creation of a system that will put them out of work.

tumba 9y ago

There are many rule-based expert systems in large scale use today. I know of applications in medicine, supply chain and logistics, and military.

tjoff 9y ago
Quite popular for airplane autopilots too (both manned an unmanned).

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> Those systems sort-of, kind-of worked, Rather more than that. For a famous example, check out the wikipedia article on MYCIN (a classic of the era): MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin There were many practical reasons why expert systems fell out of grace (although like others say they are still used widely, in real-world applications) but a large part of them was political, rather than anything to do with their effectiveness. Some historical background: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3454567_Avoiding_Another_AI_Winter https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3454567_Avoiding_An... In the end, the problem with expert systems was probably that they didn't scale as well as one would hope -primarily because it's damn hard to develop and maintain huge hand-crafted databases of knowledge solicited by experts who have very little incentive to collaborate in the creation of a system that will put them out of work.