Introduction to Artificial Intelligence - Old Questions

9.  Knowledge consists of facts, beliefs, and heuristics, justify it. Explain the advantages and disadvantages of an expert system.

Knowledge is a theoretical or practical understanding of a subject or a domain. Knowledge is also the sum of what is currently known. Knowledge consists of information that has been:

    – interpreted,

    – categorised,

    – applied, experienced and revised.

So knowledge consists of: facts, ideas, beliefs, heuristics, associations, rules, abstractions, relationships, customs.

An expert system is a set of program that manipulate encoded knowledge to solve problem in a specialized domain that normally requires human expertise.

Advantages of Expert System

• It provides consistent answer for repetitive decisions, processes and tasks.
• It holds and maintain levels of information.
• It can tackle very complex problems that are difficult for human expert to solve.
• It improves the decision quality.
• It reduces the cost of consulting experts for problem solving.
• It provides quick and efficient solutions to problem in narrow area of specialization.
• It can discover new knowledge.

Disadvantages of Expert System

• It lacks common sense needed in decision making.
• The knowledge base may not be complete.
• Expensive to build & maintain.
• Takes long time to develop.
• Errors in the knowledge base can lead to wrong decisions.
• Unable to make creative response in an extraordinary situations.