Geoff%SRI-CSL@sri-unix.UUCP (08/02/84)
From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow <Geoff @ SRI-CSL> San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, July 29, 1984 John Dvorak PERISCOPE $12,000 software? Would you pay $600 apiece for gold-plated lug nuts to be used on the beat-up rims of a '52 Ford pickup truck? What would you think of the marketing man who suggested such a products? I'd think he was crazy. There's a company down in Palo Alto that has a software package it would like someone to buy. (A little background music, please) The company is called Teknowledge Inc. and was started by Stanford professors. The company makes software for the IBM PC. You can buy an IBM PC for around $2,000. The software this company sells costs $12,000. It accomplishes one thing: It allows you to test an idea to see whether an expert system can be built around the idea. An expert system is a computer system that solves complex problems using so-called artificial intelligence. An example of an expert system is a program called Mycin. It was developed in the 1970s to diagnose meningitis and other infections. A user tells the computer certain requested facts and the computer then leads the user to something close to a diagnosis. Now most people would have made a package like this and had it run on an IBM mainframe computer or at least a VAX minicomputer. But to put a $12,000 piece of software on a personal computer is cavalier, to say the least. It's as if to say, "Yeah, we've got this package and we know what it's worth, and we're going to let the well-heeled government-financed research companies use it. Look, we can even make it run on a personal computer--look, but don't touch. This is the old pre-micro attitude toward software. It was proven to be myopic when companies like MicroPro, Ashton-Tate and MicroSoft started doing business in excess of $50 million a year by selling for $500 software that would have cost $12,000 if marketed by Teknowledge. MicroPro decided that everyone needed the power of a dedicated word processor, Ashton-Tate felt that more than just a few dozen researchers would like the power of a relational database, and MicroSoft felt that a computer language would be popular if available for $350 instead of $35,000. OK, so forget about the price. What can the Teknowledge package do? The system is called M.1 (pronounced M dot 1 by my friends). According to its own press release, you spend the $12,000 "for rapid prototyping of potential full-scale operational systems. In addition to establishing technical feasibility, these example systems serve as useful demonstrations." That means this investment just gets you started--started spending, that is. Luckily, the system can also create a stand-alone expert system with up to 200 knowledge base entries. I'm not impressed. The company goes on to exemplify this stand-alone value with a "Wine Adviser" expert system with 100 knowledge base entries. Here's the actual output from this "expert" system. This is called by the company "the deliberation process of a typical California wine expert." The computer asks the question and the user responds. Do you generally prefer red or white wines? Red. Do you generally prefer light, medium or full-bodies wines? Full. Is the main component of the meal meat, fish or poultry? Poultry Does the meal have turkey in it? No. Is the sauces for the meal spicy, sweet, cream or tomato? Tomato. Is the flavor of the meal delicate, average or strong? Average. The following wines will mostly be dry, medium-bodies, and red. They are recommended for your meal: Zinfandel (86%); Cabernet Sauvignon (86%); Burgundy (34%); Valpolicella (34%). At this point every wine connoisseur is turning over in his grave. So the user goes out and buys a Zinfandel from Amador County laced with residual sugar and 15 percent alcohol, drinks it with his chicken, gags and decides that this "expert" system is useless. The fact is that even the most mundane expert systems such as this are infinitely complex and impossible to develop with the limitations imposed by this $12,000 diskette. [To be fair, I doubt that Technowledge intended this expert system to be taken seriously as a "wine advisor" if they have given it no knowledge of individual wines. It is more likely a demonstration of the type of program and level of sophistication that could be handled with their system. If someone with inside knowledge wishes to defend the system, I will provide a reasonable amount of AIList "space" for the reply. Another point: It appears to me (from typos and other signs) that this message was typed in and not lifted from a newswire. I am willing to distribute such messages (on the sender's responsibility), but I have to be a little more conservative about passing along newswire copy. Certain universities get the newswires gratis as a stimulus to research in automated information retrieval. This service will be discontinued if it appears that our net is publishing the material in competition with other news providers. Warning suspensions have already occurred. I therefore ask readers to be selective about sending in text from newspaper items, preferably sending only summaries or extracts (with proper credit given). On the other hand, I greatly appreciate it when readers send in informative pieces like this one. Thanks, Geoff! -- KIL]