DIRE DAWA UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Assignment OF AI a Expert System (ES)

NAME

1. Yonas Yeshitela

Sub To: Saleih G.(M.S.C)

Sub Date: 13-12-2013 E.C

Table of Contents
What is an Expert System?.......................................................................................................................3
Before it all.........................................................................................................................................4
The first expert systems.....................................................................................................................4
Fading to obscurity?..........................................................................................................................5
In the 1990s and onward, the expert systems history involves the decline in the popularity and hype
of the technology. As the tech world saw an AI winter, the excitement around expert systems faded.6
10. Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................10
5. Machine learning...................................................................................................................................11
Reference..................................................................................................................................................11
1.Overview of ES
What is an Expert System?

An expert system is a computer program that is designed to solve complex problems and to
provide decision-making ability like a human expert. It performs this by extracting knowledge
from its knowledge base using the reasoning and inference rules according to the user queries.

The expert system is a part of AI, and the first ES was developed in the year 1970, which was the
first successful approach of artificial intelligence. It solves the most complex issue as an expert
by extracting the knowledge stored in its knowledge base. The system helps in decision making
for complex problems using both facts and heuristics like a human expert. It is called so
because it contains the expert knowledge of a specific domain and can solve any complex
problem of that particular domain. These systems are designed for a specific domain, such as
medicine, science, etc.

The performance of an expert system is based on the expert's knowledge stored in its knowledge
base. The more knowledge stored in the KB, the more that system improves its performance.
One of the common examples of an ES is a suggestion of spelling errors while typing in the
Google search box.

Below is the block diagram that represents the working of an expert system:
2.History of Expert System?
Before it all

The expert systems history starts almost alongside the dawn of the modern computer in the
1940s, when the first digital programmable computers began to emerge.

It wasn’t long before researchers started to think about the potential of these new machines.
What if they could emulate human decision-making? What if they could “think” as humans do?

And so it was that researchers started looking into artificial intelligence — and began on the path
to creating expert systems.

The first expert systems

Officially, the expert systems history starts in 1965. This is when the technology saw its formal
introduction by the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project. Edward Feigenbaum – the ‘father
of expert systems’ – led the inaugral project.

Edward Feigenbaum was involved with both MYCIN and Dendral — two separate early expert
systems.

Dendral was an expert system that specialised in analysing and identifying chemical compounds.
It’s widely considered the first expert system.

MYCIN was derived from Dendral. It was another expert system — one that focused on
identifying bacteria that caused infections and recommending antibiotics.

These systems didn’t try to be general intelligence. They weren’t general problem solvers.
Rather, they focused on a limited (but in-depth) foundation of knowledge. And this made them
one of the first successful attempts at AI software. That is, machines that appeared to analyse and
‘think’.

SUMEX, a computer designed to encourage the application of artificial intelligence in

medicine. Public Domain Via National Library of Medicine 
Reaching the heyday
The heyday of expert systems came in the 80s. During this time, two-thirds of Fortune 500
companies used expert systems.

Interest in expert systems was international. They saw increased research funding in Europe, and
the Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project in Japan, which saw researchers focus (in part)
on inference technology and knowledge bases.

A Symbolics Lisp Machine: an early platform for expert systems. Source

But expert systems were not without their problems. There were difficulties managing and
maintaining the knowledge base. There were difficulties writing the rules that reflected the
knowledge of experts. And the hype around expert systems was spiralling faster than the
technology could keep up.

To paraphrase a common idiom, hype comes before a fall. And this was true for expert systems.
The AI winter was coming.

Fading to obscurity?
In the 1990s and onward, the expert systems history involves the decline in the popularity and
hype of the technology. As the tech world saw an AI winter, the excitement around expert
systems faded.

The apparent decline of expert systems at this time has two reasons behind it.

The first, simply, is that expert systems failed to live up to the hype. They couldn’t perform the
over-egged functionality that had been promised. They didn’t expand to a more general form of
AI fast enough, and so they were discarded.

The other explanation is that they were absorbed by other technology tools. As expert systems
became better known, programmers and developers could use the technology behind them as part
of other offerings.

In short, rule-based systems became useful for more than expert systems, and so the standalone
expert system stepped out of the spotlight.  

The present and future

You probably won’t hear much mention of expert systems these days. Indeed, it would seem that
there are very few in use.

However, the basic tools and premises that stem from the expert systems of the past are present
in modern software.

For instance, think of the rules-based systems found in automation tools. Or, consider the
understanding of the need for data and knowledge in machine learning and other modern AI-
powered tools. Consider the different types of database for different types and formats of data
and knowledge. The advancements in these technologies all have roots in expert systems.

An expert systems history

Expert systems are a key player in the history of automation and AI. While they’re not in the
spotlight today, there was once a time where they were the height of artificial intelligence.

3. Objectives of ES???
- Capturing human expertise.

Why?

A catalogue of reasons:

- Share (with colleagues, i.e., other experts; like consultation)

- spread to areas where unavailable (maybe only one expert in this area exists)
- perpetuate (what if experts leaves your employ? or dies?)
- obviate expert's role (related to all of the above, especially "spread")
 - clarify (gives insights into problem domain)

But the most significant reason might be:

- The ideas and techniques are extensible to other areas

That is,

- Expert systems themselves are useful in learning about or developing other topics
- but, as is more often the case, techniques and pedagogies used in studying expert
systems are useful in learning about other areas

Characteristics of Expert System?

1. Domain specificity: ES operates in a micro-world

where particular kind of problem solving is required.
2. Special Programming Languages: declarative languages such as LISP and Prolog
– Efficient mix of integer and real variables
– Good memory-management procedures
– Extensive data-manipulation routines
– Incremental compilation
– Efficient search procedures
3. ES reasons over representation of human knowledge.
4. ES solves problems of genuine scientific or commercial interest
through application of heuristic or approximate methods.
5. ES, unlike ‘algorithmic’ methods, are not guaranteed to succeed.
6. ES presents solutions in a reasonable time.
7. ES provide correct solutions most of the time-equal to or better
than accuracy rate expected from a human expert.
8. Es follow difficult programs as good as or better than human
experts.
9. ES possess vast quantities of domain specific knowledge to the
minute details.
10. ES communicates with users in its own natural language.
11. ES provides extensive facilities for symbolic process rather than
numeric process

5.Types of ES?
There are different types of expert systems. They are rule based:
- expert system,

- fuzzy expert system,

- frame based expert system

- hybrid expert system

6. Logical Principles and Disciplines of ES

 Knowledge Base – 
The knowledge base represents facts and rules. It consists of knowledge in a particular
domain as well as rules to solve a problem, procedures and intrinsic data relevant to the
domain.
 Inference Engine –
The function of the inference engine is to fetch the relevant knowledge from the
knowledge base, interpret it and to find a solution relevant to the user’s problem. The
inference engine acquires the rules from its knowledge base and applies them to the
known facts to infer new facts. Inference engines can also include an explanation and
debugging abilities.
 Knowledge Acquisition and Learning Module –
The function of this component is to allow the expert system to acquire more and more
knowledge from various sources and store it in the knowledge base.
 User Interface –
This module makes it possible for a non-expert user to interact with the expert system
and find a solution to the problem.
 Explanation Module –
This module helps the expert system to give the user an explanation about how the expert
system reached a particular conclusion.
7. Methodologies
a) Expert systems require special approaches to systems analysis, especially to the collection of
the data (or rather knowledge) on which the system is based. The process of gathering the
knowledge (knowledge Acquisition) to stock the expert system's knowledge base has proved to
be the most difficult component of the knowledge engineering process. It's become known as the
'knowledge acquisition bottleneck', and Expert System projects are more likely to fail at this
stage than any other. Knowledge acquisition almost always involves extracting knowledge from
someone who is expert in the field concerned (a domain expert). This process, knowledge
elicitation, involves a variety of interview and non-interview techniques.
b) Expert systems require particular attention to the human-computer interface. User interfaces
for Expert Systems are more troublesome, and harder to develop, than those of conventional
pieces of software. This is because, for various reasons, the interactions between computer
and user are more complex than those involved in a conventional piece of software. For instance:
Conventional software typically performs some task, perhaps in interaction with the user. Expert
systems typically assist with decision-making about how a task is to be tackled, and this means
that the information that must be exchanged between the system and the user is more complex.
Different users differ in the sorts of problem-solving style they prefer.
c) Expert systems projects require special approaches to software management. The
methodologies used to build expert systems have been shaped by the problems with
knowledge acquisition, described earlier. For a long time, the favorite development methodology
was rapid prototyping. (Cyclical development means more or less the same thing). In the mid-
1980s, this approach came under criticism, because it appeared to have all the shortcomings of
the unstructured approaches which had been used, with very poor results, in
the early days of mainstream software. But the Structured Systems Analysis &
Design methodologies did not seem to be appropriate, because of the differences between
knowledge and data.

8. Architecture
9. Application Areas
Expert Systems in Organizations: Benefits and Limitations

Expert systems offer both tangible and important intangible benefits to owner companies. These
benefits should be weighed against the development and exploitation costs of an ES, which are
high for large, organizationally important ESs.
Benefits of Expert Systems

An ES is no substitute for a knowledge worker's overall performance of the problem-solving

task. But these systems can dramatically reduce the amount of work the individual must do to
solve a problem, and they do leave people with the creative and innovative aspects of problem
solving.

Some of the possible organizational benefits of expert systems are:

1. An Es can complete its part of the tasks much faster than a human expert.

2. The error rate of successful systems is low, sometimes much lower than the human error rate
for the same task.

3. ESs make consistent recommendations

4. ESs are a convenient vehicle for bringing to the point of application difficult-to-use sources of
knowledge.

5. ESs can capture the scarce expertise of a uniquely qualified expert.

6. ESs can become a vehicle for building up organizational knowledge, as opposed to the
knowledge of individuals in the organization.

7. When use as training vehicles, ESs result in a faster learning curve for novices.

8. The company can operate an ES in environments hazardous for humans.

Limitations of Expert Systems

No technology offers an easy and total solution. Large systems are costly and require significant
development time and computer resources. ESs also have their limitations which include:

1. Limitations of the technology

2. Problems with knowledge acquisition

3. Operational domains as the principal area of ES application

4. Maintaining human expertise in organizations

10. Conclusion
An expert system is a computer program that is
designed to hold the accumulated knowledge of one or
more domain experts. An expert system is a computer program that simulates the
reasoning of a human expert in a certain domain. To do this, it
uses a knowledge base containing facts and heuristic and
some inference procedure for utilizing its knowledge. Expert systems are only one area of AI.
Other areas include:

1. Natural language processing

2. Robotics

3. Computer vision

4. Computerized speech recognition

5. Machine learning

Reference
https://www.umsl.edu/~joshik/msis480/chapt11.htm

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/expert-systems/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system#Applications

https://www.cs.oswego.edu/~odendahl/coursework/isc320/notes/jackson/01-aa-
objectives.html

https://www.mygreatlearning.com/blog/expert-systems-in-artificial-intelligence/