According to Durkin, an expert system is

“A computer program designed to model the problem solving ability of a human expert”. With the
above discussion of experts in mind, the aspects of human experts that expert systems model are the
experts:

• Knowledge

• Reasoning

Dendral (1960’s) Dendral was one of the pioneering expert systems. It was developed at Stanford for
NASA to perform chemical analysis of Martian soil for space missions. Given mass spectral data, the
problem was to determine molecular structure.

MYCIN (mid 70s)

MYCIN was developed at Stanford to aid physicians in diagnosing and treating patients with a particular
blood disease. The motivation for building MYCIN was that there were few experts of that disease, they
also had availability constraints.

R1/XCON (late 70’s)

R1/XCON is also amongst the most cited expert systems. It was developed by DEC (Digital Equipment
Corporation), as a computer configuration assistant. It was one of the most successful expert systems in
routine use, bringing an estimated saving of $25million per year to DEC.
Often delays due to this problem cause huge losses until an expert can arrive at the scene to investigate.
The company decided to deploy an expert system so solve the problem. A system called ‘Drilling
Advisor’ (Elf-Aquitane 1983) was developed, which saved the company from huge losses that would be
incurred otherwise.

Assisting expert

Assisting an expert is the most commonly found role of an ES. The goal is to aid an expert in a routine
tasks to increase productivity, or to aid in managing a complex situation by using an expert system that
may itself draw on experience of other (possibly more than one) individuals.

Design

ES are used for design applications to configure objects under given design constraints, e.g. XCON. Such
ES often use non-monotonic reasoning, because of implications of steps on previous steps. Another
example of a design ES is PEACE (Dincbas 1980), which is a CAD tool to assist in design of electronic
structures.
Diagnosis and Prescription

An ES can serve to identify system malfunction points. To do this it must have knowledge of possible
faults as well as diagnosis methodology extracted from technical experts, e.g. diagnosis based on
patient’s symptoms, diagnosing malfunctioning electronic structures.

Backward chaining

Backward chaining is an inference strategy that works backward from a hypothesis to a proof. You begin
with a hypothesis about what the situation might be. Then you prove it using given facts, e.g. a doctor
may suspect some disease and proceed by inspection of symptoms.

Process continues in a recursive fashion until a premise is found that is not supported by a rule, i.e. a
premise is called a primitive,

Backward chaining is more focused and tries to avoid exploring unnecessary paths of reasoning.
Forward chaining, on the other hand is like an exhaustive search

The general stages of the expert system development lifecycle or ESDLC are

• Feasibility study

• Rapid prototyping

• Alpha system (in-house verification)

• Beta system (tested by users)

• Maintenance and evolution

The main phases of the linear sequence are

• Planning

• Knowledge acquisition and analysis

• Knowledge design

• Code

• Knowledge verification

• System evaluation

Knowledge elicitation

Getting knowledge from the expert is called knowledge elicitation vs. the broader term knowledge
acquisition.
The Deftemplate construct defines a relation’s structure

Fuzzy logic is a superset of conventional (Boolean) logic that has been extended to handle the concept
of partial truth -- truth values between "completely true" and "completely false".

Membership Function ( µ )

The degree of truth that we have been talking about, is specifically driven out by a function called the
membership function. It can be any function ranging from a simple linear straight line to a complicated
spline function or a polynomial of a higher degree.

It’s important to distinguish at this point the difference between probability and fuzzy, as both operate
over the same range [0.0 to 1.0]. To understand their differences lets take into account the following
case, where Amber is a 20 years old girl.

In probability theory : There is a 20% chance that Amber belongs to the set of old people, there’s an
80% chance that she doesn’t belong to the set of old people.

In fuzzy terminology : Amber is definitely not old or some other term corresponding to the value 0.2.
But there are certainly no chances involved, no guess work left for the system to classify Amber as young
or old.

Fuzzy inference system (FIS) is the process of formulating the mapping from a given input to an output
using fuzzy logic. This mapping then provides a basis from which decisions can be made, or patterns
discerned

Mamdani's fuzzy
inference method is the most commonly seen fuzzy methodology. Mamdani's method was among the
first control systems built using fuzzy set theory. It was proposed in 1975 by Ebrahim Mamdani as an
attempt to control a steam engine and boiler combination by synthesizing a set of linguistic control rules
obtained from experienced human operators. Mamdani's effort was based on Lotfi Zadeh's 1973 paper
on fuzzy algorithms for complex systems and decision processes.

Defuzzify

The input for the defuzzification process is a fuzzy set (the aggregate output fuzzy set) and the output is
a single number. As much as fuzziness helps the rule evaluation during the intermediate steps, the final
desired output for each variable is generally a single number.

Machine learning in developing expert systems?

Many AI applications are built with rich domain knowledge and hence do not make use of machine
learning. To build such expert systems, it is critical to capture knowledge from experts. However, the
fundamental problem remains unresolved, in the sense that things that are normally implicit inside the
expert's head must be made explicit.