Expert system

Expert system

An early form of AI, built using symbolic AI techniques, that encodes the knowledge of human specialists as a set of "if-then" rules to make decisions or diagnoses within a narrow domain, such as medical diagnosis or equipment fault-finding. Expert systems were commercially significant in the 1980s but proved brittle outside their narrow rule sets, a key reason the field shifted towards data-driven machine learning. (See also: Symbolic AI, Narrow AI)