What are expert systems?

Overview

An expert system is an intelligent program that can solve complex and challenging problems in a particular field. It provides expert, human-like decisions.

The expert system solves the problems by reasoning with the knowledge extracted from many human experts. They have particular expertise in a single domain or field, for instance, medicine, engineering, driving, mechanic, and so on. They can be useful if we provide the proper knowledge to them.

Note: The first expert system was developed by Stanford University scientists in 1965. It was designed to analyze chemical compounds.

Advantages of an expert system

The expert system can be made for any field as long as we have enough knowledge gathered from the experts from that very particular field. A human can be an expert in one area, but there is always a risk of making mistakes due to external factors.social and cultural, technological, economic, political and legal environments

Humans can be influenced by reasons, emotions, biases, and memories, whereas an expert system is a program making decisions only on the information we have provided.

The following illustration shows the basic applications of an expert system:

The expert system has the following main advantages over human experts:

• No emotions: Unlike humans, expert systems do not have emotions and don't show empathy while making decisions. It is also not affected by fatigue, anger, depression, and so on.
• High efficiency: If we provide the expert system with updated knowledge, it can provide the most efficient output in a specific scenario.
• No memory limitations: Modern computers have terabytes of storage available in the markets. The expert system can memorize terabytes of data and never forgets it, which can help them make better decisions.
• Considers all factors: Humans can miss relevant information when making a decision, which can affect the decision. On the other hand, the expert system considers all the information and facts and then make a decision.
• Expert in one particular domain: Humans cannot become total experts in one domain. Many humans are experts in one field, but they all have different expertise. The expert system has the knowledge of top experts in a specific domain.

Applications

The expert system can be made for any field as long as we have enough knowledge gathered from the experts from that field.

Following are the main categories where expert systems can be built:

• Control: To control the behavior of a specific thing based on the complex environment.
• Design: To determine the system configuration that meets all the design constraints while building any program.
• Planning: Expert systems can be used to schedule tasks.
• Interpretations: To make a conclusion based on the given raw data.
• Prediction: To predict the future events or numeric values of the given scenario.
• Diagnosis: An expert system can find the cause of problems based on observational analysis of a particular situation.

Limitations

The expert system can help make decisions and solve complex problems, but they also have some limitations which can decrease efficiency:

• Expert systems cannot learn on their own and need manual updates on knowledge.
• Expert systems cannot make creative decisions as humans do.
• The expert system can only be of one particular field, which limits its use and efficiency.
• Gathering knowledge for the expert systems can be very difficult and may require a team of knowledge engineers to collect knowledge from experts.