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Comment by zardo | Hacker News Reader

>The big difference this time is that the ceiling with machine learning is high enough for large-scale profitable applications. That wasn't the case with the previous rounds.

My company (fortune 500) depends on expert systems, some even date back to the 80's AI boom. Doing what we do, at the scale we do it, would simply not be possible without them.

Lots of companies make a lot of money with expert systems, but they have no incentive to fund AI research since expert systems have hit a clear capability ceiling.

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> Lots of companies make a lot of money with expert systems, but they have no incentive to fund AI research since expert systems have hit a clear capability ceiling.

I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here. Is the suggestion that AI cannot do better than expert systems?

I think the point is that just because companies are making money off of AI advances, that doesn't necessarily mean we won't hit another AI winter once we hit a ceiling with current techniques.

Okay but what's the relevance of expert systems to this argument?

This isn't the first round of AI that's been useful for "large-scale profitable applications"

Expert systems are one of the, supposedly not profitable, previous AI booms the preceded an AI winter.

My point is, they were and are profitable, but clearly that didn't keep winter at bay.

What's a good resource for learning about expert systems? I'm curious about this "dead end" but most of what I've found online has been about the ai winter and not the technical details of expert systems.

The Wikipedia article isn't a bad start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

I have previously built an expert system - a system of codified expert human knowledge built into a system of executable, interrelated rules. Rule engines are the execution engines of expert knowledge in an expert system. The RETE algorithm is another good place to start.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_rules_engine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inference_engine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm

When I was first learning, I downloaded and played with CLIPS, a pretty cool old expert system tool built by NASA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLIPS

:) The incentive all good corporate robots need, to fund research is generally completed research funded by the public. We know this. Don't worry yourself too much. We'll call you when we need a freeloader.

It's no my corporation. It's just the one devouring my soul.

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