Software Development Support for AI Programs
Ramamoorthy, Shekhar, Garg · Computer · 1987
Artificial intelligence is a growing branch of computer science that studies ways of enabling computers to do tasks that seem to require human intelligence. These tasks include game playing, expert problem solving, natural language understanding, and theorem proving. Many existing AI programs perform such tasks with varying degrees of success. Whereas a program that can understand natural language is still a dream, many chess-playing programs can beat expert human players. More successful AI programs include knowledge-based expert systems that are being applied to a wide spectrum of real-life problems from airline catering to oil exploration. These systems can acquire knowledge about a domain from a human expert and then use it to solve routine problems in that area. For example, expert systems can perform almost as well as human experts in the diagnosis of infectious diseases (MYCIN), finding the structure of chemical compounds (DENDRAL), and performing mathematical symbol manipulations (MACSYMA). These AI systems offer new capabilities to tackle several problems difficult to solve using the conventional algorithmic approach.