History
Expert systems were introduced by researchers in the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project, including the "father of expert systems" with the Dendral and Mycin systems. Principal contributors to the technology were Bruce Buchanan, Edward Shortliffe, Randall Davis, William vanMelle, Carli Scott and others at Stanford. Expert systems were among the first truly successful forms of AI software.
Research is also very active in France, where researchers focus on the automation of reasoning and logic engines. The French Prolog computer language, designed in 1972, marks a real advance over expert systems like Dendral or Mycin: it is a shell, that is to say a software structure ready to receive any expert system and to run it. It integrates an engine using First-Order logic, with rules and facts. It's a tool for mass production of expert systems and was the first operational declarative language, later becoming the best selling AI language in the world. However Prolog is not particularly user friendly and is an order of logic away from human logic.
In the 1980s, expert systems proliferated as they were recognized as a practical tool for solving real-world problems. Universities offered expert system courses and two thirds of the Fortune 1000 companies applied the technology in daily business activities. Interest was international with the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project in Japan and increased research funding in Europe. Growth in the field continued into the 1990s.
The development of expert systems was aided by the development of the symbolic processing languages Lisp and Prolog. To avoid re-inventing the wheel, expert system shells were created that had more specialized features for building large expert systems.
In 1981 the first IBM PC was introduced, with MS-DOS operating system. Its low price started to multiply users and opened a new market for computing and expert systems. In the 80's the image of AI was very good and people believed it would succeed within a short time. Many companies began to market expert systems shells from universities, renamed "generators" because they added to the shell a tool for writing rules in plain language and thus, theoretically, allowed to write expert systems without a programming language nor any other software. The best known: Guru (USA) inspired by Mycin, Personal Consultant Plus (USA), Nexpert Object (developed by Neuron Data, company founded in California by three French), Genesia (developed by French public company Electricité de France and marketed by Steria), VP Expert (USA). But eventually the tools were only used in research projects. They did not penetrate the business market, showing that AI technology was not mature.
In 1986, a new expert system generator for PCs appeared on the market, derived from the French academic research: Intelligence Service, sold by GSI-TECSI software company. This software showed a radical innovation: it used propositional logic ("Zeroth order logic") to execute expert systems, reasoning on a knowledge base written with everyday language rules, producing explanations and detecting logic contradictions between the facts. It was the first tool showing the AI defined by Edward Feigenbaum in his book about the Japanese Fifth Generation, Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World (1983): "The machines will have reasoning power: they will automatically engineer vast amounts of knowledge to serve whatever purpose humans propose, from medical diagnosis to product design, from management decisions to education", "The reasoning animal has, perhaps inevitably, fashioned the reasoning machine", "the reasoning power of these machines matches or exceeds the reasoning power of the humans who instructed them and, in some cases, the reasoning power of any human performing such tasks". Intelligence Service was in fact "Pandora" (1985), a software developed for their thesis by two academic students of Jean-Louis Laurière, one of the most famous and prolific French AI researcher. Unfortunately, as this software was not developed by his own IT developers, GSI-TECSI was unable to make it evolve. Sales became scarce and marketing stopped after a few years.
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