Russell, On 12/9/08, Russell Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> As an application domain for Dr. Eliza, medicine has the obvious > advantage of usefulness, but the disadvantage that it's hard to assess > performance -- specific data is largely unavailable for privacy > reasons, and most of us lack the expertise to properly assess it even > if it were available. I think this is like dog food - if the dogs like it, then it is a success. I suspect that its monetary value will far more relate to people liking it than to its success rate. IMHO, it all has much to do with the structure of the corner it occupies, and has little to do with the specific Dr. Eliza technology. If there are a few oddball conditions that it must deal with and everything else is handled by the professionals, then it will be a wild success. If there are a large number of disjoint unlikely things for it to deal with in its corner, no super-experts to program it, and no relatively clean boundary between its "last resort" corner and ordinary professional technology, then it will probably be a failure. Medicine fits this well because pretty much everything is covered EXCEPT central metabolic control problems, malnutrition, and inadvertent poisoning. > Is there any chance of applying it to debugging software, I don't see how, because it is completely unbounded and HIGHLY related to specific platforms and products. I could envision a version that worked for a specific class of problems on a particular platform, but it would probably be more work than it was worth UNLESS the user-base were really large, e.g. it might work well for something like Microsoft Windows or Office. or repairing machines? I already had circuit board repair in my sights. Perhaps you recall the story of Eleanor my daughter observing the incredible parallels between difficult circuit board repair and chronic illnesses? Here, the technology has not progressed all that much in the last 40 years, and most of the really clever methods for finding elusive problems that "stump the experts" have nothing at all to do with the specific circuits. As a bonus, these methods are NOT taught in engineering schools and many are NOT widely known. Engineers are notoriously bad at repairing their own designs - which further illustrates the potential need. I could probably rough out a KB for this in ~1 week of work. I'm just not sure what to do with it once done. Did you have a customer or marketing idea in mind? Steve Richfield ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
