Expert Systems V

Application of expert systems

Expert systems are designed and created to facilitate tasks in the fields of accounting, medicine, process control, financial service, production,human resources etc. Indeed, the foundation of a successful expert system depends on a series of technical procedures and development that may be designed by certain technicians and related experts.

A good example of application of expert systems in banking area is expert systems for mortgages. Loan departments are interested in expert systems for mortgages because of the growing cost of labour which makes the handling and acceptance of relatively small loans less profitable. They also see in the application of expert systems a possibility for standardised, efficient handling of mortgage loan, and appreciate that for the acceptance of mortgages there are hard and fast rules which do not always exist with other types of loans.

While expert systems have distinguished themselves in AI research in finding practical application, their application has been limited. Expert systems are notoriously narrow in their domain of knowledge—as an amusing example, a researcher used the "skin disease" expert system to diagnose his rustbucket car as likely to have developed measles—and the systems were thus prone to making errors that humans would easily spot. Additionally, once some of the mystique had worn off, most programmers realized that simple expert systems were essentially just slightly more elaborate versions of the decision logic they had already been using. Therefore, some of the techniques of expert systems can now be found in most complex programs without any fuss about them.

An example, and a good demonstration of the limitations of, an expert system used by many people is the Microsoft Windows operating system troubleshooting software located in the "help" section in the taskbar menu. Obtaining expert/technical operating system support is often difficult for individuals not closely involved with the development of the operating system. Microsoft has designed their expert system to provide solutions, advice, and suggestions to common errors encountered throughout using the operating systems.

Another 1970s and 1980s application of expert systems — which we today would simply call AI — was in computer games. For example, the computer baseball games Earl Weaver Baseball and Tony La Russa Baseball each had highly detailed simulations of the game strategies of those two baseball managers. When a human played the game against the computer, the computer queried the Earl Weaver or Tony La RussaExpert System for a decision on what strategy to follow. Even those choices where some randomness was part of the natural system (such as when to throw a surprise pitch-out to try to trick a runner trying to steal a base) were decided based on probabilities supplied by Weaver or La Russa. Today we would simply say that "the game's AI provided the opposing manager's strategy."