One very popular form of early AI was the Expert System. This consisted of two parts. First, a knowledge base (usually created by capturing a block of knowledge from one or more human experts). Second, a ‘shell’ or ‘inference engine’, which ran an interactive consultation session with the goal of answering questions. Here’s a quick ES primer.
Around 1999, I developed an Expert System shell for the Palm™ handheld computer. It was mainly aimed at diagnostic troublshooting. Here’s that story.
More use cases for Expert Systems:
- general training
- In-house instruction manuals
- customer support
- help desks
- chat bots
- workflow navigation assistants