Expert Systems (1970s–1980s): Expert systems like MYCIN (for medical diagnosis) and DENDRAL (for chemical analysis) dominated AI in the 1970s and 1980s by encoding human expertise into rule-based knowledge bases. Using inference engines, they applied “if-then” rules to solve specialized problems with performance rivaling human experts. MYCIN, for instance, diagnosed bacterial infections and recommended antibiotics with high accuracy. These systems proved AI’s practical value in medicine, engineering, and finance, leading to commercial adoption and a boom in AI investment. However, they struggled with uncertainty, lacked learning capabilities, and were costly to maintain. The “AI winter” of the late 1980s followed when limitations became apparent and expectations collapsed. Still, expert systems established AI as a tool for decision support and laid groundwork for modern knowledge representation, influencing today’s diagnostic and recommendation systems.
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