Artificial Intelligence Author:Herbert Alexander Simon Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: An expert program in chemistry for synthesizing organic reactions would be organized in a similar way, but it might make greater use of means-ends analysis in so... more »lving its problems. Given a set of initial reagents, their costs and their chemical reactivities, the system is asked to design a set of reactions that will produce a desired substance. Starting with the desired molecule, the system reasons backward to simpler substances from which it could be synthesized, and from these to substances available among the reagents. In choosing a desirable reaction path, it can take into account not only the characteristics of the chemical reactions, but also the costs of ingredients and energy. I cannot give you a list of the expert systems that have been built and used up to the present time, both because the list is quite long and because new systems are being created almost daily. Neither can I claim a comprehensive knowledge of them or of the extent to which they have actually been applied to real-world situations. In addition to the examples I have already mentioned, there are systems for interpreting the data in mass spectrograms, systems for configuring complex computer systems to meet the requirements of particular customers, systems for scheduling large job shops, systems for interpreting oil well drilling logs, and others. And as I mentioned earlier, the boundary is very vague between the expert systems that we call artificial intelligence systems and other kinds of highly automatic control systems. The Moving Boundaries Of AI The research strategy of artificial intelligence has followed the usual path of starting with the simplest kinds of situations—highly structured "toy" problems—and, when these have been mastered, moving on to situations that are more complex and les...« less