5.3.1 Artificial intelligence and expert systems

In discussing a domain as loosely defined as expert systems, it may be useful to present a few definitions selected from the literature. Equally instructive are the essentially graphic definitions that are available.

Expert systems, or knowledge-based systems, are a loosely defined class of computer software within the more general area of artificial intelligence (AI), that go beyond the traditional procedural, algorithmic, numerical, and mathematical representations or models. They contain largely empirical knowledge, for example, in the form of rules of heuristics, and inference mechanisms for utilizing this form of information to derive results by logical operations. They are fashioned along the lines of how an expert would go about solving a problem, and are designed to provide expert advice. Like any other model, they are sometimes extreme simplifications and caricatures of the real thing, that is, the human expert.