Artificial Intelligence:

"Anything that you hear about computers or AI should be ignored,
because we're in the Dark Ages.  We're in the thousand years
between no technology and all technology.  You can read what your
contemporaries think, but you should remember they are ignorant
savages." (Minsky in Brand, 1988)

Expert systems are artificial intelligence systems that are
intended to facilitate the assimilation of data and the
resolution of management problems.  They embody the tasks that
the computer does best, the rapid and accurate retrieval of
information from a massive memory.  Expert systems
that extract knowledge from a large information base can be
developed to supplement human expertise and judgment in the
decision processes.  

As decision tools, expert systems are designed to apply inference
engines to a knowledge base in response to user specified
criteria.  By comparing these criteria with a set of predefined
system rules, action alternatives sensitive to the context of the
user's query are retrieved from the knowledge base.  Some systems
are self-informing, expanding with the information input of each
use. Some can calculate the statistical probability of particular
diagnostic processes.  However, highly complex expert systems
with an extensive rule base have proven to be costly and time
consuming to assemble, and as yet, they have not matched the
associative thought processes of the human mind.  In view of the
capabilities of current technologies, an appropriate objective of
these systems is one of informing the decision process, not
supplanting it.  

<ffile19>   Cautions
<ffile32>   Parallel Processing