Artificial Inteligence

CSE 453

1
 Outlines
 Expert System: Introduction
 Expert System:Basic Characteristics
 Expert System:Basic Architecture
 Structure of Rule-Based Expert
System
 Advantages & Disadvantages of Rule-
based Expert System
 Recommended Text books

2
 Expert System: Introduction
 A set of programs that manipulate encoded
knowledge to solve problems in a specialized
manner.
 Knowledge is a theoretical or practical
understanding of a subjects or domain.
 Those who posses knowledge are called
experts
 Knowledge is obtained from expert source
 Knowledge is Coded in a form that is suitable
to use
 Anyone can be considered a domain expert if
he or she has deep knowledge and strong
practical experience in a particular domain
 An expert is a skilful person who can do things
3
other people cannot.
 Expert System: Introduction
 A computer Program Capable of performing at a
human-expert level in a narrow problem domain
area is called an expert system.
 The most popular expert systems are rule-based
expert systems

4
 Expert System
 Basicrather
Use knowledge Characteristics
than data
 Knowledge is encoded and maintained as an
entity separate from the control program
 Capable of explaining how a particular conclusion
is reached and why requested information is
needed
 Use symbolic representation and perform
inference through symbolic computation
 Often reason with knowledge about themselves

5
 Expert System:Basic Architecture
Explanation
module

I/O Interface Inference Case history

Engine

Editor
Knowledge Working
Base Memory

Learning
module

6
 The knowledge Base
Contains the domain knowledge useful for problem
solving. In a rule-based expert system, the
knowledge is represented as a set of rules.
Any rule consists of two parts: IF
(Antecedent/Condition)---------------THEN
(Consequent/Action).
IF –the ‘traffic light’ is green------THEN the
action is ‘Go’
IF –the ‘traffic light’ is red------THEN the action is
‘Stop’
The Database includes a set of Facts used to
match against IF (condition) parts of rules
stored in the knowledge base
7
 Inference Engine
 The inference engine carries out the reasoning
whereby the expert system reaches a solution.
 It links the rules given in the knowledge-base
with the facts provided in the database
 Accepts user input query
 Responses to questions through the I/O

8
 Inference Process
Done in three stages:
 match  select  execute
 Match : contents of the working memory are
compared to the facts and rules contained in
the knowledge base
 Select: When consistent match found the
corresponding rules are placed in the
conflict set.
 Execute: When all matched rules are placed in
the conflict set one of the rules is selected for
execution

9
 Explanation
 The Explanation facilities enable the user to ask
the expert system how particular conclusion is
reached and why a specific fact is needed.
 Explanation module trace the chain of rules fired
during a consultation with the user (the
sequence of rules that led to the conclusion).
 Explanation module must be able to explain why
certain information is needed by the
inference engine to complete a step in the
reasoning process

10
 Editor: Building knowledge base
 Special editor used by the developers:
 to create new rules for addition to the
knowledge base,
 to delete outmoded rules, or
 to modify existing rules in some way.
 Editor of this type is designed to provide
consistency test for the newly created rules, to
add missing condition to a rule to reformat a
newly created rule.

11
 The I/O interface
 The external interface allows an expert system to
work with external data files and programs writ-
ten in conventional programming language.
 User communicate with the system in a more
natural way.
 The system must have special prompt and special
vocabulary which encompasses the terminol-
ogy of the given domain of expertise.

12
 Structure: Rule-Based Expert System

Knowledge base Database

Rule: IF…THEN Fact

Inference engine

Explanation facilities

User interface

User

13
 Thermostat:
A rule-based Expert System (1 of 3)
 The system provides advices on how to select the
thermostat setting based on the season of the
year, the day of the week and time of the day.
 It uses seven linguistic objects: month, day, time,
today, operation, season and
thermostat_setting.
 Example values : month- January….; day-
Monday…; time-after 5 pm, before 9 am, between
9 am to 5 pm; today-workday, weekend; season-
summer, autumn, winter, spring; Operation-
during business hours, not during business
hours; Thermostat_setting- “14 degrees”, “18
14
degrees”, etc.
 Thermostat:
A rule-based Expert System (2 of 3)
 Options: the final goal of a rule-based system is
to produce a solution to the problem based on
input data
 In THERMOSTAT, the solution is a temperature
selected from the list of 8 options: 20, 15, 24,
27, 20, 16, 18, 14
 Dialogue: interaction with user
 What month is it? August
Rule 9:
 If month is ‘June’ or ‘July’ or ‘August’
 Then the season is ‘winter’ (Australia)
15
 Thermostat:
A rule-based Expert System (3 of 3)
 What day is it? Friday
Rule 1:
 If the day is ‘Monday’, ‘Tuesday’, ‘Wednesday’,
‘Thursday’, ‘Friday,
Then ‘Today’ is “Workday”
 What time is it? Between 9 am and 5 pm
Rule 3:
 If today is ‘Workday’, and time is ‘between 9 am
and 5 pm’,
Then ‘operation’ is “During business hours”
 Rule 17:
 If season is ‘Winter’, and ‘operation’ is “During
16
business hours”, Then ‘thermostat_setting’ is
“18 degrees”
 Rule-Based Expert Systems
Advantages & Disadvantages
Advantages:
 natural knowledge representation,
 uniform structure,
 separation of knowledge from its processing
Disadvantages:
 especially opaque relations between rules,
 ineffective search strategy and
 inability to learn.

17
 Recommended Textbooks
 [Negnevitsky, 2001] M. Negnevitsky “ Artificial Intelligence:
A guide to Intelligent Systems”, Pearson Education Limited,
England, 2002.
 [Russel, 2003] S. Russell and P. Norvig Artificial Intelligence:
A Modern Approach Prentice Hall, 2003, Second Edition
 [Patterson, 1990] D. W. Patterson, “Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence and Expert Systems”, Prentice-Hall Inc.,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J, USA, 1990.
 [Minsky, 1974] M. Minsky “A Framework for Representing
Knowledge”, MIT-AI Laboratory Memo 306, 1974.
 [Hubel, 1995] David H. Hubel, “Eye, Brain, and Vision”
 [Horn, 1986] B. K. P. Horn, Robot Vision, MIT Press, 1986.
 [Ballard, 1982] D. H. Ballard and C. M. Brown, “Computer
Vision”, Prentice Hall, 1982.

18