JESS: Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 11:43:56 -0500

Thu, 25 May 2006 10:56:32 -0700

All:

Frequently I see folks wanting (needing?) to know about some books that they can read to learn more about AI and Expert Systems.  One of the principles of the martial arts is to fully learn ONE system (meaning get a black belt in one style) before trying to learn another.  Too many times students jump from one style to another trying to find an easy way to do something.  If you start with one expert system, such as Jess, the for PETE"S SAKE learn that system first!  Learn all about it.  Get your black belt in Jess.  THEN move on to another one, such as CLIPS, drools, Mandarex, ILOG JRules, Blaze Advisor, PegaRules, Haley, ART, MindBox, Aion or one of the others.  You'll find most of the principles are about the same from one to another even though the language may change a bit.   BU,T get a good foundation before you jump around.

One of the best all-round books is a rather old one (1979) and is a collection of white papers from the God Fathers and God Mother (only one in the batch in this particular book) of rulebased systems, including one rather good article on page 177 on conflict resolution.  The name of the book is "Pattern Directed Inference Systems" and is edited by D.A. Waterman and F. Hayes-Roth.  The list of authors is like a Who's Who of the early days of AI at Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon as well as a few others.  You have to go to the used book list to get this one though.  It costs from US $8 to US $45 depending on condition.  None of the articles actually tell you HOW to program a rulebased system - very few real examples.  BUT, it does give you a really, really good view from an academic viewpoint.  The same book is probably in your university library or can be found at Amazon


Other than the Jess book (this I also have) there are a couple of other books that you can still find on the internet.  One, directly applicable to CLIPS, the grand daddy of rulebased systems, is by Giarratano and Riley, "Expert Systems: Principles and and Programming"  The  books runs about US $125 for the new 4th edition, less for the 3rd in used condition and the Amazon link is

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0534384471/qid=1148574693/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-5741779-1658435?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Now, go forth and study to show thyself a workman approved ....  well, you probably know the rest of the quotation, right?

SDG
jco
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.kbsc.com
"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene III

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