Expert system: Encyclopedia II - Expert system - Types of problems solved by expert systems

Expert system - Types of problems solved by expert systems

Typically, the problems to be solved are of the sort that would normally be tackled by a human "expert"—a medical or other professional, in most cases. Real experts in the problem domain (which will typically be very narrow, for instance "diagnosing skin diseases in human teenagers") are asked to provide "rules of thumb" on how they evaluate the problems, either explicitly with the aid of experienced system developers, or sometimes implicitly, by getting such experts to evaluate test cases and using computer programs to examine the test data and (in a strictly limited manner) derive rules from that. Generally expert systems are used for problems for which there is no single "correct" solution which can be encoded in a conventional algorithm — one would not write an expert system to find shortest paths through graphs, or sort data, as there are simply easier ways to do these tasks.

Simple systems use simple true/false logic to evaluate data, but more sophisticated systems are capable of performing at least some evaluation taking into account real-world uncertainties, using such methods as fuzzy logic. Such sophistication is difficult to develop and still highly imperfect.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Types of problems solved by expert systems", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki