An introduction to expert systems

Expert systems and knowledge-based systems have stemmed from research into artificial intelligence (AI), i.e. the mimicking of human thought processes in a computer. It was proposed that an intelligent computer system should contain some software whose purpose was to control thoughts (the inference engine) and other software representing knowledge (the knowledge base). Computer systems built with this type of software architecture are known as knowledge-based systems. Knowledge-based systems can be used in order to carry out specialized human tasks, mimicking the behaviour of experts in specialized areas. The term expert system was coined to describe such systems.<>