benson@dcdwest.UUCP (Peter Benson) (08/27/83)
I would like to know whether there are commercial expert systems available for sale. In particular, I would like to know about systems like the Programmer's Apprentice, or other such programming aids. Thanks in advance, Peter Benson !decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!benson
fostel@ncsu.UUCP (12/01/83)
Are expert systems new? Different? Well, how about an example. Time
was, to run a computer system, one needed at least one operator to care
and feed for the system. This is increasingly handled by sophisticated
operating systems. As such is an operating system an "expert system"?
An OS is usually developed using a style of programming which is quite
different from those wimpy, unskilled, un-enlightenned applications
prgrammers. It would be very hard to build an operating system in the
applications style. (I claim). The people who developed the style and
practise it to build systems are not usually AI people although I would
wager the presonality profiles would be quite similar.
Now, that is I think a major point. Are there different type of people in
Physics as compared to Biology? I would say so, haveing seen some of each.
Further Biologists do research in ways that seem different (again, this is
purely ideosynchratic evidence) differently than physists. Is it that one
group know how to do science better, or are the fieldds just so differnt,
or are the people attracted to each just different?
Now, suppose a team of people got to gether and built an expert system which
was fully capable of taking over the control of a very sophisticated
(previously manual, by highly trained people) inventory, billing and
ordering system. I claim that this is at least as complex as diagnosis
of and dosing of particular drugs (e.g. mycin). My expert system
was likely written in Cobol by people doing things in quite different ways
from AI or systems hackers.
One might want to argue that the productivity was much lower, that the
result was harder to change and so on. I would prefer to see this in
Figures, on proper comparisons. I suspect that the complexity of the
commercial software I mentioned is MUCH greater than the usual problem
attacked by AI people, so that the "productivity" might be comparable,
with the extra time reflecting the complexity. For example, designing
the reports and generating them for a large complex system (and doing
a good job) may take a large fraction of the total time, yet such
reporting is not usually done in the AI world. Traces of decisions
and other discourse are not the same. The latter is easier I think, or
at least it takes less work.
What I'm getting at is that expert systems have been around for a long
time, its only that recently AI people have gotten in to the arena. There
are other techniques which have been applied to developing these, and
I am waiting to be convinced that the AI people have a priori superior
strategies. I would like to be so convinced and I expect someday to
be convinced, but then again, I probably also fit the AI personality
profile so I am rather biased.
----GaryFostel----shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs) (12/03/83)
A large data-processing application is not an expert system because it cannot explain its action, nor is the knowledge represented in an adequate fashion. A "true" expert system would *not* consist of algorithms as such. It would consist of facts and heuristics organized in a fashion to permit some (relatively uninteresting) algorithmic interpreter to generate interesting and useful behavior. Production systems are a good example. The interpreter is fixed - it just selects rules and fires them. The expert system itself is a collection of rules, each of which represents a small piece of knowledge about the domain. This is of course an idealization - many "expert systems" have a large procedural component. Sometimes the existence of that component can even be justified... stan shebs utah-cs!shebs
bhyde@inmet.UUCP (12/10/83)
#R:ncsu:-242000:inmet:11000004:000:1514 inmet!bhyde Dec 3 22:10:00 1983 I would like to add to Gary's comments. There are also issues of scale to be considered. Many of the systems built outside of AI are orders of magnitude larger. I was amazed to read that at one point the largest OPS production system, a computer game called Haunt, had so very few rules in it. A compiler written using a rule based approach would have a 100 times as many rules. How big are the AI systems that folks actually build? The engineering component of large systems obscures the archtectural issues involved in their construction. I have heard it said that AI isn't a field it is a stage of the problem solving process. It seems telling that the ARPA 5 year speech recognition project was successful not with Hearsay ( I gather that after it was too late it did manage to met the proformance requirements ), but by Harpy. Now Harpy as very much like a signal processing program. The "beam search" mechinisms it used are very different than the popular approachs of the AI comunity. In the end it seems that it was an act of engineering, little insite into the nature of knowledge gained. The issues that caused AI and the rest of computing to split a few decades ago seem almost quaint now. Allan Newell has a pleasing paper about these. Only the importance of an interpreter based program developement enviroment seem to continue. Can you buy a work station capable of sharing files with your 360 yet? Forgive me I can't spell, if you can you feel free to feel superiour. ben hyde
jah@brunix.UUCP (Jim Hendler) (12/13/83)
I don't understand what the "size" of a program has to do with anything. The notion that size is important seems to support the idea that the word "science" in "computer science" belongs in quote marks. That is, that CS is just a bunch of hacks anyhow. The theory folks, whom I think most of us would call computer scientists, write almost no programs. Yet, I'd say their contribution to CS is quite important (who analyzed the sorting algorithm you used this morning?) At least some parts of AI are still Science (with a capital "S"). We are exploring issues involving cognition and memory, as well as building the various programs that we call "expert systems" and the like. Pople's group, for example, are examining how it is that expert doctors come to make diagnoses. He is interested in the computer application, but also in the understanding of the underlying process. Now, while we're flaming, let me also mention that some AI programs have been awfully large. If you are into the "bigger is better" mentality, I suggest a visit to Yale and a view of some of the language programs there. How about FRUMP, which in its 1978 version took up three processes each using over 100K of memory, the source code was several hundred pages, and it contained word definitions for over 10,000 words. A little bigger than Haunt?? Pardon all this verbiage, but I think AI has shown itself both on the scientific level, by contributions to the field of psychology, (and linguistics for that matter) and by contributions to the state of the art in computer technology, and also in the engineering level, by designing and building some very large programs and some new programming techniques and tools. -Jim Hendler
franka@tekcad.UUCP (12/17/83)
#R:ncsu:-242000:tekcad:3600004:000:452
tekcad!franka Dec 10 21:18:00 1983
Actually, if the expert systems community would have started on a
replacement for "human operating systems" used in the early days of computing,
we probably would have been much farther along now in representation of and
algorithms for temporal data. Just a point to think about...
From the truly menacing,
/- -\ but usually underestimated,
<-> Frank Adrian
(tektronix!tekcad!franka)kusalik@sask.UUCP (Tony Kusalik) (05/14/86)
I am looking for any pointers/info on
past/existing/prospective expert systems
for theoretical mathematics written in Prolog
or other languages based on logical inference.
thanks.
Tony Kusalik
kusalik@sask.bitnet
...!{ihnp4,ubc-vision,alberta}!sask!kimnovax!kusalikgordon@warwick.UUCP (Gordon Joly) (05/17/86)
Cc:
Bcc:
PRESS was written at the University of Edinburgh.
It is a computer algebra system. I am not sure this is what
you are after...
They will probably respond, but if not ask me or
Jane Hesketh for further info.
Gordon Joly -- {seismo,ucbvax,decvax}!mcvax!ukc!warwick!gordon
Jane is at Hesketh%uk.ac.edinburgh@UCL-CS.ARPA
or try ...!mcvax!ukc!edai!Hesketh (not so sure about that).