Below are some popular examples of the Expert System:

o DENDRAL: It was an artificial intelligence project that was made as a chemical analysis expert system.

UNIT-5

EXPERT SYSTEM & ITS CHARACTERISTICS

An expert system is a computer program that is designed to solve complex problems and to provide
decision-making ability like a human expert. It performs this by extracting knowledge from its
knowledge base using the reasoning and inference rules according to the user queries.

The expert system is a part of AI, and the first ES was developed in the year 1970, which was the first
successful approach of artificial intelligence. It solves the most complex issue as an expert by
extracting the knowledge stored in its knowledge base. The system helps in decision making for
compsex problems using both facts and An expert system is a computer program that is designed to
solve complex problems and to provide decision-making ability like a human expert. It performs this
by extracting knowledge from its knowledge base using the reasoning and inference rules according
to the user queries.

The expert system is a part of AI, and the first ES was developed in the year 1970, which was the first
successful approach of artificial intelligence. It solves the most complex issue as an expert by
extracting the knowledge stored in its knowledge base. The system helps in decision making for
compsex problems using both facts and heuristics like a human expert. It is called so because it
contains the expert knowledge of a specific domain and can solve any complex problem of that
particular domain. These systems are designed for a specific domain, such as medicine, science, etc.

The performance of an expert system is based on the expert's knowledge stored in its knowledge base.
The more knowledge stored in the KB, the more that system improves its performance. One of the
common examples of an ES is a suggestion of spelling errors while typing in the Google search box.

Below is the block diagram that represents the working of an expert system:-51.7M

924
Prime Ministers of India | List of Prime Minister of India (1947-2020)
 It was used in organic chemistry to detect unknown organic molecules with the help of their mass spectra
and knowledge base of chemistry.
o MYCIN: It was one of the earliest backward chaining expert systems that was designed to find the
bacteria causing infections like bacteraemia and meningitis. It was also used for the recommendation of
antibiotics and the diagnosis of blood clotting diseases.
o PXDES: It is an expert system that is used to determine the type and level of lung cancer. To determine
the disease, it takes a picture from the upper body, which looks like the shadow. This shadow identifies
the type and degree of harm.
o CaDeT: The CaDet expert system is a diagnostic support system that can detect cancer at early stages.

Characteristics of Expert System

o High Performance: The expert system provides high performance for solving any type of complex
problem of a specific domain with high efficiency and accuracy.
o Understandable: It responds in a way that can be easily understandable by the user. It can take input in
human language and provides the output in the same way.
o Reliable: It is much reliable for generating an efficient and accurate output.
o Highly responsive: ES provides the result for any complex query within a very short period of time.

Components of Expert System

An expert system mainly consists of three components:

o User Interface
o Inference Engine
o Knowledge Base

1. User Interface

With the help of a user interface, the expert system interacts with the user, takes queries as an input in a readable
format, and passes it to the inference engine. After getting the response from the inference engine, it displays the
output to the user. In other words, it is an interface that helps a non-expert user to communicate with the
expert system to find a solution.

2. Inference Engine(Rules of Engine)

o The inference engine is known as the brain of the expert system as it is the main processing unit of the
system. It applies inference rules to the knowledge base to derive a conclusion or deduce new
information. It helps in deriving an error-free solution of queries asked by the user.
o With the help of an inference engine, the system extracts the knowledge from the knowledge base.
o There are two types of inference engine:
o Deterministic Inference engine: The conclusions drawn from this type of inference engine are assumed
to be true. It is based on facts and rules.
o Probabilistic Inference engine: This type of inference engine contains uncertainty in conclusions, and
based on the probability.

Inference engine uses the below modes to derive the solutions:

o Forward Chaining: It starts from the known facts and rules, and applies the inference rules to add their
conclusion to the known facts.
o Backward Chaining: It is a backward reasoning method that starts from the goal and works backward to
prove the known facts.

3. Knowledge Base

o The knowledgebase is a type of storage that stores knowledge acquired from the different experts of the
particular domain. It is considered as big storage of knowledge. The more the knowledge base, the more
precise will be the Expert System.
o It is similar to a database that contains information and rules of a particular domain or subject.
o One can also view the knowledge base as collections of objects and their attributes. Such as a Lion is an
object and its attributes are it is a mammal, it is not a domestic animal, etc.

Components of Knowledge Base

o Factual Knowledge: The knowledge which is based on facts and accepted by knowledge engineers
comes under factual knowledge.
o Heuristic Knowledge: This knowledge is based on practice, the ability to guess, evaluation, and
experiences.

Knowledge Representation: It is used to formalize the knowledge stored in the knowledge base using the If-
else rules.

Knowledge Acquisitions: It is the process of extracting, organizing, and structuring the domain knowledge,
specifying the rules to acquire the knowledge from various experts, and store that knowledge into the knowledge
base.

Development of Expert System

Here, we will explain the working of an expert system by taking an example of MYCIN ES. Below are some
steps to build an MYCIN:

o Firstly, ES should be fed with expert knowledge. In the case of MYCIN, human experts specialized in
the medical field of bacterial infection, provide information about the causes, symptoms, and other
knowledge in that domain.
o The KB of the MYCIN is updated successfully. In order to test it, the doctor provides a new problem to
it. The problem is to identify the presence of the bacteria by inputting the details of a patient, including
the symptoms, current condition, and medical history.
o The ES will need a questionnaire to be filled by the patient to know the general information about the
patient, such as gender, age, etc.
o Now the system has collected all the information, so it will find the solution for the problem by applying
if-then rules using the inference engine and using the facts stored within the KB.
o In the end, it will provide a response to the patient by using the user interface.

Participants in the development of Expert System

There are three primary participants in the building of Expert System:

1. Expert: The success of an ES much depends on the knowledge provided by human experts. These
experts are those persons who are specialized in that specific domain.
2. Knowledge Engineer: Knowledge engineer is the person who gathers the knowledge from the domain
experts and then codifies that knowledge to the system according to the formalism.
3. End-User: This is a particular person or a group of people who may not be experts, and working on the
expert system needs the solution or advice for his queries, which are complex.

Why Expert System?

Before using any technology, we must have an idea about why to use that technology and hence the same for the
ES. Although we have human experts in every field, then what is the need to develop a computer-based system.
So below are the points that are describing the need of the ES:

1. No memory Limitations: It can store as much data as required and can memorize it at the time of its
 application. But for human experts, there are some limitations to memorize all things at every time.
2. High Efficiency: If the knowledge base is updated with the correct knowledge, then it provides a highly
efficient output, which may not be possible for a human.
3. Expertise in a domain: There are lots of human experts in each domain, and they all have different
skills, different experiences, and different skills, so it is not easy to get a final output for the query. But if
we put the knowledge gained from human experts into the expert system, then it provides an efficient
output by mixing all the facts and knowledge
4. Not affected by emotions: These systems are not affected by human emotions such as fatigue, anger,
depression, anxiety, etc.. Hence the performance remains constant.
5. High security: These systems provide high security to resolve any query.
6. Considers all the facts: To respond to any query, it checks and considers all the available facts and
provides the result accordingly. But it is possible that a human expert may not consider some facts due to
any reason.
7. Regular updates improve the performance: If there is an issue in the result provided by the expert
systems, we can improve the performance of the system by updating the knowledge base.

Capabilities of the Expert System

Below are some capabilities of an Expert System:

o Advising: It is capable of advising the human being for the query of any domain from the particular ES.
o Provide decision-making capabilities: It provides the capability of decision making in any domain,
such as for making any financial decision, decisions in medical science, etc.
o Demonstrate a device: It is capable of demonstrating any new products such as its features,
specifications, how to use that product, etc.
o Problem-solving: It has problem-solving capabilities.
o Explaining a problem: It is also capable of providing a detailed description of an input problem.
o Interpreting the input: It is capable of interpreting the input given by the user.
o Predicting results: It can be used for the prediction of a result.
o Diagnosis: An ES designed for the medical field is capable of diagnosing a disease without using
multiple components as it already contains various inbuilt medical tools.

Advantages of Expert System

o These systems are highly reproducible.

o They can be used for risky places where the human presence is not safe.
 o Error possibilities are less if the KB contains correct knowledge.
o The performance of these systems remains steady as it is not affected by emotions, tension, or fatigue.
o They provide a very high speed to respond to a particular query.

Limitations of Expert System

o The response of the expert system may get wrong if the knowledge base contains the wrong information.
o Like a human being, it cannot produce a creative output for different scenarios.
o Its maintenance and development costs are very high.
o Knowledge acquisition for designing is much difficult.
o For each domain, we require a specific ES, which is one of the big limitations.
o It cannot learn from itself and hence requires manual updates.

Applications of Expert System

o In-designing-and-manufacturing-domain
It can be broadly used for designing and manufacturing physical devices such as camera lenses and
automobiles.
o In-the-knowledge-domain
These systems are primarily used for publishing the relevant knowledge to the users. The two popular ES
used for this domain is an advisor and a tax advisor.
o In-the-finance-domain
In the finance industries, it is used to detect any type of possible fraud, suspicious activity, and advise
bankers that if they should provide loans for business or not.
o In-the-diagnosis-and-trouble-shooting-of-devices
In medical diagnosis, the ES system is used, and it was the first area where these systems were used.
o Planning-and-Scheduling
The expert systems can also be used for planning and scheduling some particular tasks for achieving the
goal of that task.

Next Topic
Forward Chaining and backward chaining in AI

In artificial intelligence, forward and backward chaining is one of the important topics, but before understanding
forward and backward chaining lets first understand that from where these two terms came.
Inference engine:

The inference engine is the component of the intelligent system in artificial intelligence, which applies logical
rules to the knowledge base to infer new information from known facts. The first inference engine was part of
the expert system. Inference engine commonly proceeds in two modes, which are:

a. Forward chaining
b. Backward chaining

Horn Clause and Definite clause:

Horn clause and definite clause are the forms of sentences, which enables knowledge base to use a more
restricted and efficient inference algorithm. Logical inference algorithms use forward and backward chaining
approaches, which require KB in the form of the first-order definite clause.

Definite clause: A clause which is a disjunction of literals with exactly one positive
literal is known as a definite clause or strict horn clause.

Horn clause: A clause which is a disjunction of literals with at most one positive literal is
known as horn clause. Hence all the definite clauses are horn clauses.

Example: (¬ p V ¬ q V k). It has only one positive literal k.

It is equivalent to p ∧ q → k.

A. Forward Chaining

Forward chaining is also known as a forward deduction or forward reasoning method when
using an inference engine. Forward chaining is a form of reasoning which start with atomic
sentences in the knowledge base and applies inference rules (Modus Ponens) in the forward
direction to extract more data until a goal is reached.

The Forward-chaining algorithm starts from known facts, triggers all rules whose premises
are satisfied, and add their conclusion to the known facts. This process repeats until the
problem is solved.

Properties of Forward-Chaining:

o It is a down-up approach, as it moves from bottom to top.

o It is a process of making a conclusion based on known facts or data, by starting from
the initial state and reaches the goal state.
o Forward-chaining approach is also called as data-driven as we reach to the goal using
available data.
 o Forward -chaining approach is commonly used in the expert system, such as CLIPS,
business, and production rule systems.

Consider the following famous example which we will use in both approaches:

Example:

"As per the law, it is a crime for an American to sell weapons to hostile nations.
Country A, an enemy of America, has some missiles, and all the missiles were sold to it
by Robert, who is an American citizen."

Prove that "Robert is criminal."

To solve the above problem, first, we will convert all the above facts into first-order definite
clauses, and then we will use a forward-chaining algorithm to reach the goal.

Facts Conversion into FOL:

o It is a crime for an American to sell weapons to hostile nations. (Let's say p, q, and r
are variables)
American (p) ∧ weapon(q) ∧ sells (p, q, r) ∧ hostile(r) → Criminal(p) ...(1)
o Country A has some missiles. ?p Owns(A, p) ∧ Missile(p). It can be written in two
definite clauses by using Existential Instantiation, introducing new Constant T1.
Owns(A, T1) ......(2)
Missile(T1) .......(3)
o All of the missiles were sold to country A by Robert.
?p Missiles(p) ∧ Owns (A, p) → Sells (Robert, p, A) ......(4)
o Missiles are weapons.
Missile(p) → Weapons (p) .......(5)
o Enemy of America is known as hostile.
Enemy(p, America) →Hostile(p) ........(6)
o Country A is an enemy of America.
Enemy (A, America) .........(7)
o Robert is American
American(Robert). ..........(8)

Forward chaining proof:

Step-1:
In the first step we will start with the known facts and will choose the sentences which do not
have implications, such as: American(Robert), Enemy(A, America), Owns(A, T1), and
Missile(T1). All these facts will be represented as below.

Step-2:

At the second step, we will see those facts which infer from available facts and with satisfied
premises.

Rule-(1) does not satisfy premises, so it will not be added in the first iteration.

Rule-(2) and (3) are already added.

Rule-(4) satisfy with the substitution {p/T1}, so Sells (Robert, T1, A) is added, which infers
from the conjunction of Rule (2) and (3).

Rule-(6) is satisfied with the substitution(p/A), so Hostile(A) is added and which infers from
Rule-(7).

Step-3:

At step-3, as we can check Rule-(1) is satisfied with the substitution {p/Robert, q/T1, r/A},
so we can add Criminal(Robert) which infers all the available facts. And hence we reached
our goal statement.
Hence it is proved that Robert is Criminal using forward chaining approach.

B. Backward Chaining:

Backward-chaining is also known as a backward deduction or backward reasoning method

when using an inference engine. A backward chaining algorithm is a form of reasoning,
which starts with the goal and works backward, chaining through rules to find known facts
that support the goal.

Properties of backward chaining:

o It is known as a top-down approach.

o Backward-chaining is based on modus ponens inference rule.
o In backward chaining, the goal is broken into sub-goal or sub-goals to prove the facts
true.
o It is called a goal-driven approach, as a list of goals decides which rules are selected
and used.
o Backward -chaining algorithm is used in game theory, automated theorem proving
tools, inference engines, proof assistants, and various AI applications.
o The backward-chaining method mostly used a depth-first search strategy for proof.

Example:

In backward-chaining, we will use the same above example, and will rewrite all the rules.

o American (p) ∧ weapon(q) ∧ sells (p, q, r) ∧ hostile(r) → Criminal(p) ...(1)

Owns(A, T1) ........(2)
 o Missile(T1)
o ?p Missiles(p) ∧ Owns (A, p) → Sells (Robert, p, A) ......(4)
o Missile(p) → Weapons (p) .......(5)
o Enemy(p, America) →Hostile(p) ........(6)
o Enemy (A, America) .........(7)
o American(Robert). ..........(8)

Backward-Chaining proof:

In Backward chaining, we will start with our goal predicate, which is Criminal(Robert), and
then infer further rules.

Step-1:

At the first step, we will take the goal fact. And from the goal fact, we will infer other facts,
and at last, we will prove those facts true. So our goal fact is "Robert is Criminal," so
following is the predicate of it.

Step-2:

At the second step, we will infer other facts form goal fact which satisfies the rules. So as we
can see in Rule-1, the goal predicate Criminal (Robert) is present with substitution
{Robert/P}. So we will add all the conjunctive facts below the first level and will replace p
with Robert.

Here we can see American (Robert) is a fact, so it is proved here.

Step-3:t At step-3, we will extract further fact Missile(q) which infer from Weapon(q), as it
satisfies Rule-(5). Weapon (q) is also true with the substitution of a constant T1 at q.

Step-4:

At step-4, we can infer facts Missile(T1) and Owns(A, T1) form Sells(Robert, T1, r) which
satisfies the Rule- 4, with the substitution of A in place of r. So these two statements are
proved here.
 Step-5:

At step-5, we can infer the fact Enemy(A, America) from Hostile(A) which satisfies Rule-
6. And hence all the statements are proved true using backward chaining.

ext Topic
Difference between backward chaining and forward chaining

Following is the difference between the forward chaining and backward chaining:

S. Forward Chaining Backward Chaining

No.

1. Forward chaining starts from known facts and Backward chaining starts from the goal and works
applies inference rule to extract more data unit it backward through inference rules to find the required
reaches to the goal. facts that support the goal.

2. It is a bottom-up approach It is a top-down approach

3. Forward chaining is known as data-driven Backward chaining is known as goal-driven
inference technique as we reach to the goal technique as we start from the goal and divide into
using the available data. sub-goal to extract the facts.

4. Forward chaining reasoning applies a breadth- Backward chaining reasoning applies a depth-first
first search strategy. search strategy.

5. Forward chaining tests for all the available rules Backward chaining only tests for few required rules.

6. Forward chaining is suitable for the planning, Backward chaining is suitable for diagnostic,
monitoring, control, and interpretation prescription, and debugging application.
application.

7. Forward chaining can generate an infinite Backward chaining generates a finite number of
number of possible conclusions. possible conclusions.

8. It operates in the forward direction. It operates in the backward direction.

9. Forward chaining is aimed for any conclusion. Backward chaining is only aimed for the required
data.

o Forward chaining as the name suggests, start from the known facts and move forward
by applying inference rules to extract more data, and it continues until it reaches to the
goal, whereas backward chaining starts from the goal, move backward by using
inference rules to determine the facts that satisfy the goal.
o Forward chaining is called a data-driven inference technique, whereas backward
chaining is called a goal-driven inference technique.
o Forward chaining is known as the down-up approach, whereas backward chaining is
known as a top-down approach.
o Forward chaining uses breadth-first search strategy, whereas backward chaining
uses depth-first search strategy.
o Forward and backward chaining both applies Modus ponens inference rule.
o Forward chaining can be used for tasks such as planning, design process
monitoring, diagnosis, and classification, whereas backward chaining can be used
for classification and diagnosis tasks.
o Forward chaining can be like an exhaustive search, whereas backward chaining tries
to avoid the unnecessary path of reasoning.
o In forward-chaining there can be various ASK questions from the knowledge base,
whereas in backward chaining there can be fewer ASK questions.
o Forward chaining is slow as it checks for all the rules, whereas backward chaining is
fast as it checks few required rules.

*********************************************