AI Fundamentals

Expert systems are AI programs designed to emulate the decision-making of a human expert by applying a knowledge base and a set of inference rules or algorithms to a specific problem domain. A symptom checker that analyzes user-reported symptoms through algorithms to produce a diagnosis and suggest treatment mirrors this expert-system model, much like early medical diagnostic AI systems (e.g., MYCIN) that used rule-based reasoning to diagnose infections and recommend therapy. This is distinct from temporal reasoning, which deals with modeling and reasoning about time-dependent events, and robotics, which concerns physical, embodied AI systems performing tasks in the real world—neither of which describes a diagnostic algorithm-based checker.