Expert Systems, Knowledge Engineering for Human Replication

An expert system is a computer program that attempts to replicate the expertise and decision-making abilities of a human expert. Expert systems are the most widely developed area of artificial intelligence, with a variety of applications ranging from medical diagnosis through to financial decision-making and geological prospecting. They often use a heuristic or self-learning approach to the solution of a problem, in which feedback of the results of a particular course of action influences subsequent decisions. Expert systems usually have two principal parts: a knowledge base (a special database, which contains facts and other information representing the rules and experience of an expert practitioner in a particular field); and an inference engine, which interprets the knowledge base in relation to the particular problem being presented.