expert system
In artificial intelligence (AI), an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert.
Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as ...
developed in the 1980s by
Schlumberger
Schlumberger (), doing business as SLB, is a global multinational oilfield services company. Founded in France in 1926, the company is now incorporated as Schlumberger NV in Willemstad, Curaçao, with principal executive offices in Houston ...
with the help of artificial-intelligence workers at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
to aid in the analysis of data gathered during oil exploration. The Advisor was generally not merely an
inference engine
In the field of artificial intelligence, an inference engine is a software component of an intelligent system that applies logical rules to the knowledge base to deduce new information. The first inference engines were components of expert systems ...
and a knowledge base of ~90 rules, but generally was a full-fledged
workstation
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...
, running on one of
Xerox
Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...
's 1100 Dolphin Lisp machines (or in general on Xerox's "1100 Series Scientific Information Processors" line) and written in INTERLISP-D, with a
pattern recognition
Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...
menu
In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to the customer. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose, often with prices shown – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-est ...
-driven interface. It was developed by a number of people, including Reid G. Smith, James D. Baker, and Robert L. Young.
It was primarily influential not because of any great technical leaps, but rather because it was so successful for Schlumberger's oil divisions and because it was one of the few success stories of the AI bubble to receive wide publicity before the
AI winter
In the history of artificial intelligence (AI), an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in AI research.
Unfortunately, this method had limited application in more complex geological environments outside the Gulf Coast, and the Dipmeter Advisor was primarily used within Schlumberger as a graphical display tool to assist interpretation by trained geoscientists, rather than as an AI tool for use by novice interpreters. However, the tool pioneered a new approach to workstation-assisted graphical interpretation of geological information.
References
Other sources
*''The AI Business: The commercial uses of artificial intelligence'', ed.
Patrick Winston
Patrick Henry Winston (February 5, 1943 – July 19, 2019) was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succe ...