Word: expertism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While Weizenbaum and other critics insisted on measuring Mycin against human intelligence and knowledge, others looked at the system and saw a computer- handling expertise that had previously resisted automation. No one, however, was going to build expert systems if they took several years to construct. Solution: create a Mycin without medical knowledge -- in effect, construct an empty shell into which programmers could pour all kinds of different expertise. In 1977 a team of Stanford researchers under Feigenbaum dubbed the new shell Emycin (for Empty Mycin) and used it to build several more expert systems. Emycin spurred a number...
What saved the fledgling industry was the discovery that applied artificial intelligence could produce concrete results when properly used. In 1978 the Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corp. joined forces with AI Theoretician John McDermott of Carnegie Mellon University to develop XCon (for Expert Configurator), a system to assist salesmen in choosing parts for DEC computer systems from among tens of thousands of alternatives. XCon went on line in 1981, and for several years it was the only expert system in commercial use that companies could employ to gauge the worth of their technology. Today XCon configures almost every Digital computer...
...projects. "Three years ago it became apparent that this technology had gone past the research phase and had become commercial," he recalls. "IBM decided we could make money in it, and that we should be the world leader." Cautiously at first, IBM began to search for opportunities to apply expert systems internally -- for "the low-hanging fruit," as Schorr puts it today...
After the company's first shot -- the DEFT system to diagnose troubles in IBM's giant disk drives -- proved a bull's-eye, IBM Chairman John Akers became an enthusiast. He gave Schorr the green light to promote expert systems throughout the company. IBM now has 50 knowledge systems up and running, and Schorr expects that number to double each year for the next few years...
Rule-based systems such as XCon and DEFT, however, still have drawbacks. When asked a question, the expert system blindly searches through its data base to see which rules apply, then searches through the data base again to find the data for the rule. More sophisticated knowledge systems store information in frames, which organize it along with its relevant attributes. AI Pioneer Marvin Minsky of M.I.T. noticed that when people enter a room, they have a set of expectations about what they will find -- a desk or chair, perhaps, but certainly not, for example, an ocean. His idea...