Talk:Expert system

message: It might be just me, but I personally don't see the point wikifying every third word, simply because there's a wikipedia entry for it.. Maybe toning this down a bit would make the article a bit more readable as well as ease the search for relevant links... Just a sugestion (I'd do it myself, but I'm still on my wiki training-wheels)
:Agreed. Many of the links are not relevant and cause much distraction. Maybe we should use an expert system to write about expert systems. --68.100.104.193 02:36, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Do people have any specific examples of words that are wikified but don't need to be? I agree with the general point that often technical articles like this get wikified to death but IMO it's sort of a trade off. On the one hand there are a lot of fairly deep concepts that need to get introduced into an article like this and especially in the intro we don't want to discuss all of them so links make a lot of sense. One thing I noticed is that the link to if-then-else in the intro links to the wrong thing. It should be linking to an article on rule-based or production systems not just if-then-else statements in code as it currently does, they are similar but there is a significant difference. I'm pretty sure there is an article on rule systems. I think I'm going to change or remove that link and will review the article in general to see if anything jumps out at me as overkill. BTW, this article was heavily edited a while back by an undergrad class so I suspect that might be part of the issue. In my experience students and new editors tend to over link. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:26, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: So I changed that one link at the start to if-then so that it points to a better article. Nothing else really jumped out at me. I could see making a case that neither if-then or conditional logic need to be links but I left them for now. In my opinion there is enough justification for them. A real novice may have no idea what expert systems are all about and that distinction, using an inference engine rather than direct programmatic control of logic flow, to me that's the essence. Then again, there is a link to inference engine later in the intro so I could see a case that we don't need the first two. I'll leave it for now but interested if other people have feedback on specific links that don't belong, or anything else for that matter. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 23:05, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Too many wikis?

message: The article has a paragraph on "Software Architecture", but I do not really see a software architecture desribed (not talking about the usual association of architecture with "lines and boxes"). This is rather a description of "how" the software performs things than an architectural overview.
:What else do you want to see considering this is a high level overview article? Or what would you call that section other than "architecture". To me that section absolutely IS about the architecture and I'm puzzled by your statement about "the usual association... with lines and boxes". "Lines and boxes" are exactly what I mean by architecture. What is the big picture I would draw for a team if we had to build an expert system shell from scratch?  Granted it would need to go a lot deeper than drawing two boxes for KB and Inference Engine but that would definitely be the starting point and IMO that is a very rational way to define a high level software architecture for any expert system. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 13:49, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, the 'Benefits of expert systems' reads like an advertisement. Maybe that should be dumped altogether? (It adds no information.) 131.174.206.242 10:21, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Strongly agree.  It seems quite non-NPOV to me. --81.178.104.80 23:30, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

text: Just want to document the stuff about "proprietary IBM IP" is NOT the case anymore, the article has been virtually completely re-written since most of these comments were made. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 13:52, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Limitations

message: I put the cleanup template at the top of this page because it has been two years and there is still egregious and/or poor wiki-linking on this page.  See for instance the use of the word analysis or problem in the introduction.  These terms are used in, arguably, the most important part of the article but link to non-specific pages.  The page on problem is so general as to be meaningless for the purposes of a discussion about expert systems.  It would probably be a good idea if someone who has a solid interest in this topic were to go through and do some wide-ranging edits on this page, take out poor wiki-links, and make sure the article hangs together as a whole.  Kaimiddleton 02:44, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have a problem with this sentence: 'Other "Wizards" are a sequence of online forms that guide users through a series of choices, such as the ones which manage the installation of new software on computers' <- this "example" is not an instance of online forms (at least in Windows environment an installation wizard and online form are quite different things)! --194.251.240.116 18:29, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup 

message: I made a rearragement of the article to a more stadard stucture. I hereby wanted to create space for further development. I think this article can be improved on multiple point:
* More general overview
* A separate history section 
* More about study of expert systems
* The topics should be compressed or placed in separate articles
* The article needs references 
* And maybe some motre literature
Maybe some further rearragement is necessarily. Good luck - Mdd 12:57, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Please consider separating the list of Expert Systems such as Mycin, Prospector, etc. from Expert System Shells such as CLIPS and Jess and Computer programming languages that can be used to create Expert Systems and Expert System Shells such as Prolog, Lisp etc.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.145.96.22 (talk) 17:05, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree that it's not optimally organized. I'll see what I can do. Mikael Häggström (talk) 17:43, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rearrangement of the article 

message: The text below 3: Expert Systems Topics, 3.2: End user refers to a missing response in the dialog preceding it and also to a 'Why' question. Neither one of these appear in the article at this time. Is this an error? Sorry, I don't have time to investigate or rewrite the article myself. 
-Kevinz 20:39, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is there a problem in section 3.3?

message: The definition starts out by describing an expert system as a computer program.  Although this is where I think the article should lead the reader; as computer programs are the colloquial usage, as a systems theorist I find that this description jumps ahead of itself.  A description of a system and an expert might be a better place to start.
And I agree with Mdd that the article needs to be either cleaned up or re-written.  I would be willing to give it a try.  I agree with Kizza06 on the wiki links.  If I write it we won't need to worry about copyrights or intellectual property.  The bulk of the article will come straight from my cerebral cortex; no plagiarism.  And I will use appoprate citations as needed.  I may need to practice with the sandbox but the template is workable.
Also the History and general theory need added.  
Everything can be defined as a system.  The study of systems provides an understanding of the differences and similarities among all known systems.  Specialization in certain types of systems is requisite to being an expert in any field.
Experts systems are systems and thus can not deviate from systems theory which is very expansive.  Experts are the boundaries of the system.  So, if you add more experts, including the results of the current system, the expertise grows producing a compound system.  Wikipedia is an example of an expert system. A search (query, question) is input and the result set is expert knowledge. If you click on a wiki (Hyperlink) you will branch to another topic (drill down), which is an example of functional expertise that is programed into the system.  Because the branch is programed by an expert in programing, that functional logic (hperlink) is a subset of the set of experts who are the boundaries.  Knowledge based systems are another subset or type of expert system and should NOT be included in an introduction.
To begin I might expand on some of the table of contents and delete others or replace them with wikis.
--jtp15 (talk) 12:40, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I cleaned up the intro. The rest is still pretty bad too but someone else will have to address. Lycurgus (talk) 01:13, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Good article but yes, needs cleanup and also needs inline references (move bibliography to be inline refs). Anyone willing to take a first attempt; else I suppose I'll have to visit back here another day and spend a while... Harvey the rabbit (talk) 02:26, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Responses and offer to help.  The introduction needs a rewrite 

message: "An expert system is software that attempts to reproduce the performance of one or more human experts". This definition needs improving because the present definition includes violin recitals by a maestro, penalty shots by a professional footballer and acting by Brad Pitt.  Hope you get the drift :-) pgr94 (talk) 22:29, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition 

message: Part of the problem is that the topic is damn near long dead. Neural networks, or flat decision trees are often used where expert systems would once have been used. 
The basic ideas are still valid.
An expert provides relationships and certainties, which are encoded in some computer readable format, and questions are asked, with potentially uncertain responses, preferably with some effort being expended in attempting to ask questions likely to eliminate or greatly reduce the confidence of many choices. 
20q.net is an example of a fairly nonstandard expert system, since it attempts to self update by asking questions it is uncertain about the answer to for the object in question after becoming fairly certain it has found the correct object. But had the learning not been enabled, and a hand produced data set been given, it would definitely be a standard expert system.
But 20q.net is the only expert system I'm aware of using, except for trivial decision trees like many troubleshooters.
I suspect a large part of why expert systems fell out of favor is that creating a good dataset for some topic is very difficult and time consuming. A simple animal identification expert system is not really useful unless it has thousands of animals perhaps even tens of thousands, and many questions. As far as I can tell this is just too much work. 74.5.162.102 (talk) 04:14, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  The article is terrible 

message: Part of the problem is that large chunks of this article were plagiarised in 2003 by a Wikipedia editor who is no longer active, from a US patent filed in 1986! (The patent is not copyrighted so that's not a legal problem, but it is unethical to fail to attribute it.) I attributed some of those chunks, but then I reached the section called "Procedure node interface" and I'm not sure if that section should even be in this article - it's still written like it was part of a patent. Can an "expert" take a look at this section (no pun intended)? Also, it occurs to me that someone should check the other passages added at around the same time, to see if they were plagiarised from somewhere else.--greenrd (talk) 19:07, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plagiarism from patent 

message: In this edit text is copy/paste from the Knowledge representation article. -- Mdd (talk) 21:40, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copy-paste registration 

message: Gmstanley (talk) 18:00, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Frankly, I found that section hard to understand. It needs at least an introduction "for dummies", without terms such as procedures coordinator (which is currently red linked). Also, a reference wouldn't harm. I moved the text to a hidden template above until fit for reinsertion. Mikael Häggström (talk) 15:15, 19 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  We should delete the "Procedure node interface" section 

message: The first 6 references are useless as currently presented.  I take it these were part of the copied patent application, too?  They show up as live links (rather than plain text) in the reference section, but clicking on them does nothing. Furthermore, the titles aren't long enough to give anyone enough information to find them. So, anyone wanting to read those references will fail.   For instance, ACM 1998?  The ACM publishes a huge number of things in any year - this reference is completely useless. The others are probably texbooks or academic papers, but you can't tell from just the author, date, and page number. A title is needed. People who publish textbooks also write academic papers, and some journals get into those high page numbers as well. Having the references would be a very good thing, but the ones that are there are useless. 
Can anyone provide the titles for the references?  
Maybe this information could be found in the patent, but the misleadingly-live link to the patent in reference 7 doesn't do anything either.  Gmstanley (talk) 19:50, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The refs were added here. Did the editor make a typo in the template and get a different one, or has the template changed? --Ronz (talk) 20:26, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can someone fix the first 7 references? 

message: I shortened down the length of the section on "Ability to make relevant inquiries" while preserving the point, I think - please correct if some point is missing now. Also, I'm a little bit uncertain about the role of control flow systems in this, but I integrated the link as I thought was accurate. Mikael Häggström (talk) 15:40, 19 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shortened section on relevant inquiries 

message: Hi,
I'm a french contributor : Jean-Philippe de Lespinay (en), [de Lespinay (fr)] et La Maieutique. The articles about Artificial Intelligence and expert system forget one major innovation in technology expert system: "La Maieutique" associated with zero-order logic. Yet it is the only innovation in AI history that allowed the expert systems to be developed without any computer knowledge, in natural language. This also is the only one that gave the IA the famous reasoning capacity required by Minsky forty years ago. With the reasoning, expert system, in my opinion, is the only technology which deserves to be called "Artificial Intelligence". In Larousse Encyclopedia, there are two good articles about expert system and AI (unfortunatly in French) which we could learn. What do you think ? Pat grenier (talk) 14:26, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I see I have no response. In that case, I start modifying the article. We'll see this time if there are reactions. I do it with Jean-Philippe de Lespinay, who knows the subject well. But we do not speak English well. I hope other contributors will enhance the English form of the text. Pat grenier (talk) 09:28, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Improvement of the article

message: There have been a number of changes by Pat Grenier that have 
# removed reliable sources  Sources should only be removed if they are replaced with better sources. 
# added unacceptable sources (Citing a French wikipedia article)  Please see WP:RS
# unsourced statements: "Expert system offers many advantages for users compared to traditional programs because it operates like a human brain". Please see WP:V
# added non neutral point of view.  "A program written in the form of expert system receives all the specific benefits of expert system, among others things it can be developed by anyone without computer training and without programming languages."  Please see WP:NPOV 
Pat Grenier, your contributions are welcome, but basic familiarity with the above three Wikipedia guidelines is essential to avoid having your edits reverted. pgr94 (talk) 09:22, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you pgr94 but your recommendations ("three Wikipedia guidelines") are too vague for me, especially because I speak little English. I treat the substance of the article so that it becomes finally clear, and not of the form. If no one wants to help me I invite you to revert my edits. Sorry. Pat grenier (talk) 10:49, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Personally, I don't think your English is bad.  But if language is a barrier to understanding the guidelines (WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:RS), may I suggest visiting the French Wikipedia which has similar guidelines ( , , ) They are not so much about form, but about content. pgr94 (talk) 11:22, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, that's more clear for me. You want me neutrality, I remove french Wikipedia article and I source my comments. No problem. I take care of it. 90.54.117.217 (talk) 11:33, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: And now, what do you think ? After, I have to write a chapter about history of expert system, then delete the old chapters (if you agree...). Pat grenier (talk) 14:33, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: NOTE: Pat grenier has been blocked indefinitely for abuse of multiple accounts, and has a clear WP:COI regarding any material concerning Jean-Philippe de Lespinay. Given this, it would seem wise to revert all grenier's edits - but perhaps someone more familiar with the subject might like to ensure that nothing useful is removed in the process. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:50, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

text:  Comparing before vs. after, it looks like a lot of material has been removed from the article as well. —Ruud 12:14, 10 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Ruud, I have no objection to going back.  I introduced some references and a little material after Grenier started, perhaps they could be recovered as they were from expert system textbooks.  Also, Grenier did remove a lot of material that was pretty poor.  There'd be a case for stripping much of that material again after a revert.  Anyway, be bold, there is plenty of scope for improvement. pgr94 (talk) 15:06, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changes by User Pat Grenier 

message: I added the following paragraph to disadvantages:
Depending on implementation, the inference engine may perform an action analogus to depth search in a graph, which is known to be an exponential time algorithm. The way rules are formulated and/or the order in which concurrent rules are processed may, in speciffic and important cases, reduce this aspect into practically effective limits, however, at least breaf understanding about the inference engine's implemented algorithm and/or algorithmics and data structure theory is necessary, which may apear difficult to the expert. Sometimes it can be the case that, for example, by chance or when the greedy algorithm may suffice, without any knowledge the expert to produce at least sufficient or optimum aplications. The converse (i.e. no set of rules to allow a non-exponential execution time) may also be the case, when, in practice, there is known at least a non-exponential execution time algorithm for particular problems or for the information provided by any formulation of the set of rules that may solve the problem an be specified. This second statement is true in theory, but in practice it may not be adressed at all, due to the fact that expert systems are not dedicated to such types of problems.
I wanted to be bold, but I might be wrong. Please review it and edit/modify/remove it, as to be correct.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.119.8.190 (talk) 09:12, 23 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added to disadvantages 

message: I would say this article is 50% correct, at best, 30% redundant and 20% flatly incorrect. And it lacks coverage of say 50% of the field. Overall a pretty low quality item. I do not have time to work on it, but really needs to get tagged as unreliable. History2007 (talk) 14:51, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Definitely agree. pgr94 (talk) 12:30, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

text: Definitely agree.  The article wasn't very good before the Pat Grenier changes, and in some ways got worse after the Pat Grenier changes, turning into a sales document for his research group.   For instance, he added nonsense about scalability being an advantage, when actually that's a major (but solvable) concern both from the knowledge engineering view (finding all the appropriate rules to change when making modifications), and from a computing efficiency view at runtime (leading to approaches like the Rete algorithm to avoid the otherwise exponential computing complexity.).  His changes to the definition of forward and backward chaining area were almost useless, and confused the applications with the basic mechanics.  (For example, fault diagnosis can be done via forward or backward chaining depending on what the rules represent.  If the IF/THEN rules represent cause in the antecedent leading to symptom effects in the THEN portion, the user might enter the symptoms, and backward chaining would be used to find the causes.  But if the IF/THEN rules represent patterns of known symptoms in the antecedent leading to causes in the THEN portion, the user might enter the symptoms and forward chaining would be used .  If no one objects, I'll probably try to partly replace the definitions of forward and backward chaining with some of the earlier pre-Grenier material as it existed at the time.  Whoever wrote that original section on chaining did a good job, although it may be more detailed than really needed.   Gmstanley (talk) 00:23, 6 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I've started editing the article and have already fixed some of the mistakes. Just wanted to document a real whopper I hadn't noticed until now (finished history moving on to architecture). It says that rules are specified in "natural language"! What? Abso-fucking-lutely they are not! I mean I know people who spent a lot of DARPA money on research into how to do that, to be able to take natural language and recognize rules from it but there is no way that is what an expert system shell does. Saying that betrays a fundamantal misconception of the term "natural language" as used by AI people. I probably don't even need to document this, it's so bad I could just remove it but forgive me I just feel like venting for a bit. I'm amazed that has been here so long. It won't be much longer :)  RedDog (talk) 18:58, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Article quality

message: This abbreviation occurs several times in the article as well as in this talk page. As far as I can see, there is no hint about what it means. Is it a typo or something different than AI? I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ia#Internet_and_information_technology, but no luck there.
with no success
:Fixed.  It's the French acronym for AI, added by a french-speaking editor.  pgr94 (talk) 12:29, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is an "IA"? 

message: The article up to Sept 8, 2011, had a section called "Real Time Adaption", mostly written by me. This got deleted without justification by Pat Grenier on Sept 9, 2011.  I propose restoring it, as shown in my proposed revision of Oct. 5, 2012 (removed on October 6).   There's really two separate questions:  (1) is this topic appropriate, and (2), am I the right person to write it.  AndyTheGrump pointed out that the text references technical papers for which I am the author or a co-author, so perhaps I have a conflict of interest. He suggested that the appropriate thing to do is highlight this first in the talk page -- so here it is...   
(1) I'd say the topic is clearly an appropriate part of expert systems history.  It was actually put into large-scale online use in industries such as the process industries and in telecommunications control centers. It could be argued that because real time expert systems were so widely used in industry in the 1990-2000 time period (with some still in use today), they had a bigger economic impact than other applications that were sometimes just interesting demonstrations.
(2) As to conflict of interest, I see how that could be a concern, but I don't believe it should be considered significant.  The only people who are likely to fix up a flawed article for an out-of-favor topic like this one are going to be the ones who were intimately involved in it.  From 1987 to 2001, I played a major role for the most popular provider of real time expert systems shells for the process industries (Gensym), also building add-on products for specific applications and other industries, and implementing applications for end users as well.  But expert system products are not popular any more.  I don't work for Gensym, don't get any payments from them, and don't have friends who still work there (everyone originally working for the company before its acquisition was laid off).  I've occasionally done consulting for people still using these tools.  But that's mainly because of contacts already established, and would happen whether that section exists or not.
I do cite technical papers for which I was a co-author or author. It's hard to avoid the first one, because it was the first paper summarizing the needs and a practical solution to the process control audience (the major yearly conference of IFAC - International Federation of Automatic Control, so it was widely noticed).  The second one is a summary of numerous actual, installed industrial applications and lessons learned.  Summaries are hard to find elsewhere.  This was presented as the plenary paper at another IFAC conference (so again, getting widespread notice).  The fourth reference is to an entire conference proceedings, not to my own publication.  
In short, 3 of 4 references are technical papers I co-authored.  There is a general need in Wikipedia to cite references to support the text.  Given my heavy involvement in this field from its early days, these are very appropriate references, and presented at technical conferences attended by both academics and industrial people who demand high-quality presentations.  The first defines the ideas, the second shows the applications and lessons learned, and the third amplifies some more lessons learned from more years of experience. 
These comments are already longer than the proposed section itself.  Comments?  Gmstanley (talk) 04:43, 6 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Restoring the "Real Time Adaption" section 

message: This article has a decidedly French bias to it, citing a lot of projects done in France and not enough elsewhere. 
I am French and I was involved in some of this work and some of the conferences, so I can see a lot of names that are familiar to
people in France, but less to people elsewhere. Feraudyh (talk) 12:43, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  French bias? 

message: I'm a student and currently studying masters level health informatics with an information systems undergraduate. As part of one of my assessments, I'm to contribute to the world knowledge base, known as wikipedia. I've selected this article to be one that I will help to contribute and improve. As I'm studying health informatics, I thought I'd include information about how expert systems exists in the healthcare sector of Australia, (particularly Victoria), and their influences. 
Note: that some countries may have already adopted and electronic health record, so my writing may seem a bit "hopeful"; in a sense that we're looking toward the future when some countries ARE already in the future (in terms of health technology). Please leave critique if you find it my additions unacceptable.Vsikiric (talk) 04:55, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Systems in health and healthcare

message: Just to establish my credentials, I worked for several years in the AI group of a Big 5 Consulting firm. I agree with the general critique above on the overall quality of the article. To start with IMO the disadvantages section is just wrong. It's sort of the traditional academic argument about expert systems, that knowledge-engineering is hard. I don't really disagree with anything said, knowledge-engineering is hard, but getting ANY expert's dedicated time to develop and maintain a system is one of the hardest tasks. IMO the main disadvantage with expert systems is that the whole idea never made sense except for research prototypes to prove ideas. The idea of expert systems is to replace an expert with software. That idea never caught on. It's not that expert level knowledge isn't included in systems, it definitely is, it's just that having that knowledge be a stand alone rule-based system doesn't work well. The non-functional requirements for a system: the UI, ease of learning and use, and especially integration with other systems and access to large legacy databases, those are the things that make or break a system and by the time you are done with all that stuff you no longer have an "expert system" you just have yet another computer system that has some deep knowledge in one of it's sub-systems. I ended up making this a lot longer than I intended. Anyway, that's my 2 cents, interested what others think, I'm going to see if I can find articles or papers that support what I just said and if I can I will edit the article a bit. RedDog (talk) 23:18, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disadvantages of Expert Systems 

message: Several times in the current article it states that a defining feature of Expert Systems is that they can be built without professional developers. Nonsense. Total nonsense. It's true that many tool vendors claimed this could be done but I don't know of a single deployed system that was built without professional developers. If anyone has some examples please speak up. Domain experts can build prototypes. Domain experts sometimes (not often) can write rules using the tool rather than in English or a spec language but never, ever have I heard of an actual deployed system that went beyond the prototype stage without developers. For one thing debugging an expert system can be very difficult. The fact that it's not a procedural system is a double edged sword. As the rule base gets complex there can be unforseen and unwanted interactions between various rules that are hard to understand and fix. Also, as I stated in another Talk section, some of the most important issues for expert systems turn out to be the same issues for any other system: integration with other systems, access to large legacy databases, training, etc. All those things require software pros. RedDog (talk) 22:27, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  No professional developers? 

message: I just edited the introduction text. Several sections were simply pasted in from one of the references, a paper on Nigerian expert systems. That actually wasn't the main reason I was editing the text actually, it read more like a hype article from an expert system vendor than an actual assessment of the technology, I tried to make it more realistic but wanted to document that the text I replaced was in part plagiarized, I'm worried that more of the text of the current article may be as well. RedDog (talk) 23:07, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: That is worrying - though it is worth bearing in mind that sometimes the copy-pasting turns out to have gone the other way, from our article to a later source. Figuring out what came first isn't always easy. If phrases have been copied directly, rather than paraphrased, it is a copyright issue, rather than just plagiarism, and should probably be raised at the Wikipedia:Copyright problems noticeboard. Regulars there are probably the best people to figure out what exactly has gone on. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:25, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I sincerely apologize. I was going to follow up on your suggestion but before I did I wanted to double check that it was plagiarized. The sequence of events was I made a change, then was double checking the refs and I could have sworn I came across two sentences in a paper that were identical to ones I had re-written. At that point it didn't occur to me to double check using the history, I just thought "better document this". When I double checked (which I obviously should have done before writing the comment above) while the wording was similar, it wasn't identical and definitely wasn't plagiarism. I apologize for making such a dumb mistake, I know plagiarizing is serious and I shouldn't have written anything before double checking and I will remember in the future never to trust my memory. I think I've handled it appropriately by using the strikethrough text but if there is something different I should do, let me know, it didn't seem right to just delete the initial comment, I felt I should be honest about documenting my stupid mistake.   RedDog (talk) 13:45, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Text in Introduction was plagiarized 

message: Currently the history says the following: "The French Prolog computer language, designed in 1972, marks a real advance over expert systems like Dendral or Mycin: it is a shell"  IMO this is totally innacurate. Comparing Prolog and Expert systems is like comparing LISP and Expert Systems, it's apples and oranges. Prolog is similar to LISP or Smalltalk. All three are high level interpreted programming languages that are usually found with powerful development environments. Expert system shells are a step up. They are less general purpose but more focused on a specific domain of problems. Prolog is no more an "advance" on expert systems than Smalltalk or Objective C. Also, I spent a significant time in the 80's working with clients in many different industries to build expert systems. I can remember one project where Prolog was on the short list of possible tools and not selected but that was the only time I remember it even coming up. Rule based shells from Aion, Exsys, Art, Intellicorp were the dominant tools in the US at least. I plan to change this section but wanted to document it here in case anyone wants to discuss it first. RedDog (talk) 15:12, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! There are other statements in the history I'm going to prune back or just eliminate. There are several statements such as "Prolog was the most popular AI language in the world" and "In the 80's everyone thought AI would succeed". IMO this kind of language is the superficial kind of analysis you get in bad trade magazines and vendor promotional materials. Most of these statements are either not really true, vacuous, or not all that important. The claim about Prolog is I think almost certainly false because US systems were so prevalent but the bottom line is it's pointless to make claims or even argue if Prolog is "better" than rules. What mattered then and even more so in retrospect is to understand what the strengths and weaknesses of the various environments were not which one was the "best". RedDog (talk) 16:25, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Challenging Statements in History 

message: The current article really has an academic feel to it. This is kind of frustrating because unlike when I usually write an article I have no problem figuring out what to say. I know what happened I was there. But it's odd that when you are in the trenches you don't spend much time reading about it you are too busy doing it. I've tried some online searches and will try again with more parameters but I thought I would document here, if anyone has some good references to journal articles, trade articles, or books on the actual applications of expert systems in the real world please let me know. I've looked at many of the refs here and often when people talk about "real world application" what they really mean is research software that never got beyond the prototype phase. There were real actual expert systems deployed in the real world with training, db integration, etc. I want to emphasize that side more. thanks in advance for any ideas. RedDog (talk) 16:47, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Looking for good refs on AI in the Real World 

message: There is currently an additional Bibliography section in addition to the actual references.  Many of the references were unfamiliar to me and I've read most of the major "classic" AI books and papers by Feigenbaum, Winston, Hayes-Roth, etc. Last night I went through most of the unfamiliar references and most of them should not be there. Mostly they are what I think are "vanity" links. Someone put a link to a paper, presentation, web site, they were responsible for or of a friend. There is one link to a web site that is all in French but the actual links on the site just point back to more Wikipedia AI articles. The few things in the bibliography that are worth keeping are just references to a few moderately good books like Winston. But there are many other classic books (e.g. the Hayes-Roth expert system book, the Feigenbaum Handbook of AI) that aren't included. I plan to just delete this entire additional bibliography. By now I've beefed up the actual references so that many of the best books actually are used as references. That wasn't the case before, many of the references were to obscure French papers by people I never heard of. And I plan to do more work on the references as I'm in the process of getting some more books and (re)reading them and then will update the actual bibliography as appropriate. So I think the whole additional list can and should just be deleted which I plan to do shortly but just wanted to document why here in case anyone wants to discuss first. RedDog (talk) 14:40, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plan To Delete Entire Bibliography 

message: Just wanted to document: I retrieved a section of the old article that was about real time expert systems. You can see the discussion about it above, I thought it was worth preserving for when we expand the section on expert systems applications. I initially had it in my Sandbox but I've moved it here User:Mdebellis/realtimeadaptaton I will leave it there indefinitely.  Feel free anyone who wants to expand the article to take a look at that page and use it. I plan to come back to this at some point but not sure when right now. RedDog (talk) 23:32, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Real Time Adaptation section from old article 

message: I just found a nice online resource. I've been looking for some of my favorite books from the good old days, especially The Handbook of AI which surprisingly my local library (part of a big city) doesn't have. And I found this:  https://archive.org/stream/handbookofartific01barr#page/n0/mode/2up  At first I was just thinking I wanted the reference since I remember some things from the book well enough to use without re-reading but that URL has the whole book! It's kind of in a clunky format but beggers, etc. Anyway, wanted to document and share this in case others can use it. RedDog (talk) 16:31, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Great Online Resource 

message: I made a change recently and I want to document the reason why. The beginning of the article said that expert system rules are if-then-else rules. I changed it to if-then. Here is the reason: while many of the  shells allowed you to specify an "else" clause for a rule it wasn't common and some systems didn't even include it. Moreover, in general having an "else" for an expert system rule sort of defeats one of the main purpose of an inference engine. What an inference engine does is abstract you away from worrying about control flow. The engine looks at the rule base and decides what rules to fire and in what order rather than the programmer explicitly programming the flow of control. If you add an "else" clause to a rule you are violating that idea because if a rule has an else clause it will always fire, either X or Y but one of them have to be true. Now I'm not saying that was never done or that it was never useful or good design, I'm just saying it gives the wrong idea to describe expert system rules in general as if-then-else rather than just if-then. When you have just if-then rules the inference engine has more control over selecting which rules to fire on each pass.  I think whoever added the "else" didn't get that. That is further supported because the link they had for if-then-else was to this article If-then-else which is about conditional code in programs which is not the same as an inference engine. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 18:21, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why I changed  if-then-else to if-then in Intro 

message: I was just looking at the first references. There are an awful lot of references to document that expert systems were the first business use of AI. But as far as I can see each ref looks fairly decent and I'm usually of the opinion you can't ever really have too many refs if they are good refs and relevant which from what I've seen those are. I wonder if others have any opinion? The other issue is right now the second ref for "conventional programming" may not be very useful. It just links to a PC Magazine site glossary of computer terms and this definition: "Definition of:conventional programming.   Writing a program in a traditional procedural language, such as assembly language or a high-level compiler language (C, Pascal, COBOL, FORTRAN, etc.)." To me that doesn't add much and given that there is a link to a page on procedural programming I'm tempted to just remove it. Anyone have any opinions either way?  --MadScientistX11 (talk) 14:06, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  References in Intro 

message: Substituted at 14:51, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This is a response to MadScientistX11's undo of changes in this revision.
Languages like Prolog don't even have literal "if-then" statements, anyone not aware of Expert Systems might think most they are mostly giant conditional programs rather than automated intelligence and knowledge/diagnostic systems. The argument that this statement is the most "understandable to a general audience" robs the reader of insight into the multitude of techniques used in expert systems, it is thought-terminating. 
Rule based systems are not "if-then rules", and Expert Systems are possibly not even best described as completely "rule based systems". Automated reasoning has a wide variety of implementation requirements like goal searching and non-determinism. Chapter 6 of "Principles of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems Development" is wholly dedicated to non-determinism and statistical methods used in Expert Systems, which is a large part of their power.  "Principals of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems" (1988), David W. Rolston. ISBN:
 0-07-053614-7
Changing "if-then rules" to something more along the lines of declarative programming statements will help clear this up. Expert Systems are not giant conditional programs, they are a form of Artificial Intelligence guided by a human user, and as such use many of the various AI techniques whether that be neural nets, automated reasoning, symbolic intelligence, goal solving, etc.
My original edit and proposal is to change it to something along the likes of "declarative rules", or "declarative statements", if a reader does not understand declarative vs procedural code they will never understand what make Experts Systems what they are vs normal programs or codebases.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:2C6:380:2DE9:90B6:E063:120A:BA25 (talk) 21:22, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The introduction clearly says "represented mainly as if–then rules rather than through conventional procedural code".  It clearly distinguishes between if-then rules rather than conventional procedural code.  Further more this is the introduction we are talking about, meant to give a very high level overview. If you look in the article there is a whole section: Expert_system#Software_architecture that talks about inference engines, knowledge bases, forward chaining, and backward chaining. Regarding Prolog this is American Wikipedia. The vast majority of expert systems in the US were built using rule-based systems and all the significant well known early expert systems were built that way: Mycin, Hearsay, Andersen Consulting's Mortgage Loan Advisor, Eliza,  the USAF diagnostic expert system for fighter planes, etc. Prolog was used primarily in Europe and in any case this too is in the article already in History where it talks about Prolog. Also, in the introduction, the if-then rules phrase is linked to the article about Rule-based_systems so again it's very clear for someone who wants more detail that what is being talked about is not the same as if-then statements in procedural code. I stand by the change. The introduction should be brief and in simple terminology that anyone can understand. Adding "declarative" doesn't give any information that is not already available in all the ways I just described and will make it more confusing for people who aren't programmers and won't know what "declarative" means. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 01:07, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Just a couple more points. If you look on this page at this section: Talk:Expert_system#Why_I_changed_if-then-else_to_if-then_in_Intro you will see that I am sympathetic to your point and that a while ago I changed the article because I thought at that time it did sound to much like standard if-then-else statements in procedural code. Also, I looked through Building Expert Systems by Hayes-Roth, Waterman, and Lenat. I realize it's far from the only book on the topic but I think most people familiar with AI would agree it's one of the definitive books. When I joined Andersen Consulting's AI group it was the first book people told me to read. I looked in the index for the word "declarative". I looked for "Declarative" itself as well as under "Rules", "Knowledge", and "Knowledge base" (all of those other words had many references and sub-topics with references) and the word "declarative" was nowhere to be found. I also realize I never responded to your point that "Automated reasoning has a wide variety of implementation requirements like goal searching and non-determinism". I agree with that point but that is a point for articles about AI or about Automated Reasoning. The majority of Expert Systems, and every expert system that I'm aware of that was used for actual commercial purposes had none of those characteristics. IMO (I wouldn't put this in the article because I don't have a reference for it but I'm just stating my opinion now) that is WHY they were the first applications of AI technology that were actually used for deployed systems and not just research prototypes: because they focused on solving domain specific problems using technology that was revolutionary compared to COBOL or other tools commonly used at the time but that were not overly ambitious and could be easily used and maintained by non-research IT people. Finally, although this isn't relevant to this particular topic I realized I never declared (no pun intended) that I'm the same user as Red_Dog. I changed my account many years ago for privacy reasons. I've never used the two accounts at the same time. Once I created this one I never used the Red_Dog account again but just wanted to be open that Red_Dog and I are the same user. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 19:24, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

text: Calling them "if-then rules" is confusing.  Using the terms "declarative" and "inference" will make clear the difference that is desired to be made clear.  I'm not surprised that the the term "declarative" wasn't in common use in 1984 when "Building Expert Systems" was released, but it is a commonly accepted and understood term nowadays (I mean, just go to the wikipedia page on declarative programming and you'll find lisp, prolog, etc). Nathan.s.chappell (talk) 13:21, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changing the "If-Then" (rule based system) in summary, gross oversimplification and ties to normal procedural codebases 

message: I noticed someone added a red linked name (Jairus Lainibo) to the beginning of the history section:  "Expert systems were introduced by the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project led by Edward Feigenbaum, who is sometimes termed the "father of expert systems"; other key early contributors were Jairus Lainibo, Bruce Buchanan, and Randall Davis."  I've never heard of "Jairus Lainibo" and when I google him he shows up in some online sources but not in any good primary sources. I checked the index of my copy of Building Expert Systems and I searched for his name in Russel and Norvig's book and he didn't show up in either. If someone wants to add him back please provide a good reference. Also, keep in mind that the reference shouldn't say that he was an AI researcher but rather an AI researcher recognized as important as Feigenbaum, Buchanan, and Davis. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 03:19, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removing Jairus Lainibo from beginning of History section 

message: I just noticed this sentence in the introduction: "However, some experts point out that expert systems were not part of true artificial intelligence since they lack the ability to learn autonomously from external data.[9]"  I checked the reference and it does indeed say this but I still think this statement should be removed. Not every sentence in every journal article is something that needs to be included in an encyclopedia. People sometimes say wrong and outlandish things even in peer reviewed journals. Also this article is published by the Kelly School of Business in Indiana University, so the peer review on this is not from people with a deep knowledge of AI. I think this is a ludicrous statement.  Every major overview book on AI that I'm aware of (Russel and Norveg, The Handbook of AI, Charniak and McDermott's Intro to AI,...) talks in great depth about Expert Systems. Expert systems came from the AI lab at Stanford. If you look in the proceedings of the American (and International) Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) you will find countless articles about expert systems and various research areas for experts systems such as truth maintenance, reasoning with uncertainty, and knowledge acquisition. My guess is that in the early years at least, 20% or more of the articles were on some expert system related topic. And just in general it's ludicrous to say that the only systems that qualify as AI are those that have "the ability to learn autonomously from external data". That not only rules out Expert Systems but huge amounts of work done in Symbolic AI such as theorem proving, frame based languages, ontology languages such as Loom and OWL and classification engines such as Hermit, and on and on. It is accurate to say that the more recent trend in AI with Machine Learning is to emphasize systems that can "learn autonomously from external data." and if someone has a reference to a good source (one published in an AI or Computer Science journal or by someone well known in AI now like Andrew Ng) I think that kind of wording in the intro would be a good idea, to say that expert systems didn't use technology that now dominates AI. But the way the sentence is now I think is just so  obviously wrong. If anyone disagrees please explain why. I'm going to delete that sentence after a while if no one else comments. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 20:37, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Just a follow up on the comment above. I went to the AAAI site and found the archives of past conferences. See this link: https://aaai.org/Library/conferences-library.php I also did a search on the AAAI site for "Expert System" and this is what I got: Expert Systems on AAAI web site My estimate of 20%  for the conference papers was pretty accurate. In the first years that I looked starting in the 1980's there was a major section (one out of about 6-7) on Expert Systems and some of the papers in other topics also were highly relevant. And as one can see in that search Expert Systems have countless articles in various publications from AAAI besides the conference proceedings. I think this strongly supports my contention that saying Expert Systems were not AI is clearly wrong and the sentence should be removed. I'll hold off a bit longer in case anyone wants to discuss it. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 17:50, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  --MadScientistX11 (talk) 15:08, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I just noticed that this bit somehow got back into the article. I removed it again for all the reasons that I documented above. I also wanted to emphasize that IMO the reference, while it seems to be published in a journal was published in a business journal directly associated with a specific business school (and not one that is at all well known or has a track record for emphasizing technology). With a few exceptions (e.g., HBR) publications like that seldom get serious peer review, they are essentially a way for grad students and professors from the school that publishes to add to their publication count.  If someone wants to revert my edit please discuss it here first and respond to my comments above. Thanks. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:06, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Expert Systems are not AI? 

message: ChatGPT should be mentioned, shouldn't it? And a cross-reference, too, to the Wikipedia article on ChatGPT, wouldn't anyone agree? 46.24.26.231 (talk) 16:31, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: No. It is not an expert system at all! 193.166.223.5 (talk) 13:21, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, but a link might be useful nevertheless (saying something link "not to be confused with todays advanced Chatbots"). - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 18:43, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  ChatGPT is an extension of an expert system? 

message: I'd start with pointing out that this article gives really no indication of how useful or popular "Expert Systems" are today. Reading this article one can easily get the impression that "Expert Systems" along the lines of those developed in the 80's and 90's are still in use today. The history section merely ends with an alleged "resurgence" in the 21th century.
From reading articles about artificial intelligence over the years I've only ever encountered "Expert System" being referred as a historical phenomenon and not something actual AI researchers and developers are working on today. Arcade222 (talk) 20:36, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I've heard it referenced once in an article about Mark Zuckerberg talking about something or other. I think it is probably more of a marketing term maybe for a particular form of interaction with a computer? Today we would probably call such a system a chatbot or virtual assistant. just a guess. Thedonquixotic (talk) 07:20, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article needs a lot of work 

message: This section is not very clear relative to the preceeding section. Some of the writing could use a review.  RoslinTollcross (talk) 02:38, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Current approaches to expert systems