Brain & Computer--Inference

[ Present Problems from Inference ]

ven as successful as expert systems have been, the strict "If.. Then" rules reaffirms how unintelligent computers are.  Like an actor reading a script, early expert systems needed complete information in order to make any kind of decision.  However, in the real world, people almost never know everything about a particular subject, but they can still make decisions.  On the contrary, people can infer--to derive additional information from what is presented--to make up for lack of knowledge by making assumptions from what is known.

In AI, an inference engine is a system of applying the rules on a knowledge base.   It is these rules that allow a computer to perform deductive and inductive reasoning.  The car-not-starting problem diagnosis problem in the section "Brain & Computer--Indexing" is an example of deduction with the computer going from general knowledge("the car won't start") to specific("the car has no gas").  Conversely, induction, otherwise known as generalization, goes from the specific to the general.  In an expert system, it merely involves back-tracking up the decision-tree.(Kurzweil 293)

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Present Problems from Inference