Archive of Expert systems Articles

We all know the story about the emperor’s new clothes. I’ve been thinking about prioritization and scheduling, and as far as I know, no one is promoting that we maximize value - they (and we) have been promoting that we do the most valuable stuff first. Doing the most valuable things first does not result in getting value the fastest. In this article, we show why not.

Today we recorded an interview with James Taylor, author of Smart (Enough) Systems, How To Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions. This book, written by James Taylor with Neil Raden comes out on Jun 29th (2007), and is available for pre-order from Amazon today. Our interview covers many of the topics in their book, with a focus on the ideas inside and the benefits you can get from applying them, in just under an hour.

We’ve studiously avoided talking about requirements for expert systems because it is such a small niche of software development. Please let us know in the comments on this post if this is an area you would like to read more about. This post is both a discussion of the main barrier to success for these systems and an introduction to future posts if you ask for them in the comments on this post. Expert systems, or AI programs can solve some of the hardest problems. Yet AI software has not dominated the software landscape, neither Heinlein’s nor Vinge’s fictions have become real. Why has AI software failed? It isn’t that the hardest problems are too hard to solve, it’s that they often don’t need to be solved at all.