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Brittleness

One can imagine many examples of hypothetical situations where expert systems fall into ridiculous situations like deciding that a man is pregnant, or believing that a 20 year old has been working for 22 years. The bottom line of all these examples is that the meanings of the symbols are in the mind of the programmer, thus the constraints about these meanings are also in there. You cannot predict every possible circumstance that your program is going to get into, thus there will be some constraints that you forget to encode.

Deniz Yuret
Tue Apr 1 21:26:01 EST 1997