Question: Summary of an Expert System? 

Answer: An expert system is a class of computer programs developed by researchers in artificial intelligence during the 1970s and applied commercially throughout the 1980s. In essence, they are programs made up of a set of rules that analyze information (usually supplied by the user of the system) about a specific class of problems, as well as provide analysis of the problem(s), and, depending upon their design, recommend a course of user action in order to implement corrections.\n\nTypically, 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.\n\nSimple 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
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