Building expert systems
Handbook of AI
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An expert system was constructed to aid the military intelligence analyst in performing the Indications & Warning task: assimilating hundreds of incoming reports, and predicting where and when an armed conflict might erupt next The system currently contains 60 condition/action rules and 170 other frames that deal with the sorts of objects and processes that are being reported on. It employs a two-dimensional Blackboard to accomodate reports from very different sources, to efficiently trigger relevant rules, and to keep the human analyst abreast of the situation. In the process of building this system, and testing it with professional analysts,* we were led to some nonstandard design decisions which may be of general Al interest: (1) each rule has strong and weak conditions, which are run in separate worlds. By examining which important, high-level conclusions differ, it is possible to pinpoint which few specific facts should be doublechecked (i.e., facts whose certainty the system is very sensitive to); (2) each rule is represented as a frame, facilitating browsing through the rules, adding new rules, and assigning credit and blame to rules.