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James et All;
There is no one article, book, or publication that
can/will provide the miracle insight into rulebased systems. From what I have
seen, it is like dealing with a multi-faceted diamond - pick a facet of
rulebased systems and when you look into this facet, you will (and have to) see
where all the other facets are leading - it can NOT be avoided because of
the multiple interdependencies of conditions/actions, system
requirements/design, coding/testing, etc., etc., etc.. The multi-faceted vision
that is encountered can be mind-boggling until it is understood that there is,
in fact, an order to the system when it is examined one facet at a time. The
discipline of learning the facets and where they are in relation to each other
probably requires more effort than most people are willing to
expend.
Rich Halsey
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 11:43
AM
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
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