What is Expert system and what are the benefits? Are they harmful?

Question

Expert system have been integrated into many Web sites for consumers. For examples, health related Web-sites help patients "self diagnose" illness before seeing physician.

Answer 1

expert systems are a type of computer program intended to capture the knowldge of human experts.  They are typically very specialized to a certain domain of knowledge like medicine.  The technology was old when I was studying it as an undergrad in 93. Basically you interview people, create a bunch of 'rules' that 'fire' depending when certain 'facts' are asserted. Basically a bunch of if then statements that trigger off something called an 'inference engine'.

Theyre not dangerous, but they also dont seem to be all that useful cause the technology has never really taken off as far as I can tell.

Answer 2

An expert system is a software system that attempts to reproduce the performance of one or more human experts, most commonly in a specific problem domain, and is a traditional application and/or subfield of artificial intelligence.

A wide variety of methods can be used to simulate the performance of the expert however common to most or all are 1) the creation of a so-called "knowledgebase" which uses some knowledge representation formalism to capture the subject matter experts (SME) knowledge and 2) a process of gathering that knowledge from the SME and codifying it according to the formalism, which is called knowledge engineering. Expert systems may or may not have learning components but a third common element is that once the system is developed it is proven by being placed in the same real world problem solving situation as the human SME, typically as an aid to human workers or a supplement to some information system.