Abstract
A potentially valuable distinction that might capture at least part of the difference between experts and expert systems has been drawn by Drew McDermott (1981b). McDermott suggests that there is a fundamental difference between finished programs and expert systems. Thus, in explaining the development of the expert system Rl, which is employed to configure VAX-11 computer systems, he expresses concern for a rather subtle issue:
It is not clear that all (or even most) of R1’s supporters realize that R1 will always make mistakes. The problem is that at least some of R1’s supporters think of it as a program rather than as an expert. There is, of course, a big difference between programs and experts. Finished programs, by definition, have no bugs. When experts are finished, on the other hand, they’re dead. [McDermott (1981b), p. 29]
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Fetzer, J.H. (1990). Program Verification. In: Artificial Intelligence: Its Scope and Limits. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1900-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1900-6_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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