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From: jbn@wdl1.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Recoding Lisp programs in C
Message-ID: <739@wdl1.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 5-Oct-85 21:23:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: wdl1.739
Posted: Sat Oct  5 21:23:55 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Oct-85 15:09:44 EDT
Sender: notes@wdl1.UUCP
Organization: Ford Aerospace, Western Development Laboratories
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Nf-ID: #R:bcsaic:-32400:wdl1:18900006:000:1064
Nf-From: wdl1!jbn    Oct  5 17:28:00 1985


     Well, the Ventilator Manager, an ``expert system'' from Stanford intended
to make decisions about when to move patients off or back onto a respirator,
was converted from EMYCIN to a rather small BASIC program, in which form
it is actually useful; the EMYCIN form required a DECsystem 2060 and ran too
slowly to keep up with real time.  Interestingly, if you 
read the thesis, and have any background in process control, you realize
that it's a simple control problem; you have a process with a few states,
a few incoming sensor values, and limits on each sensor value which can
either trigger an alarm, cause a state change, or both; in each state,
the limits are different.  That's all that seems to be needed, and a few
pages in the back of the thesis give all the values and states.
But apparently the underlying simplicity of the problem wasn't realized, 
or at least admitted,  until they built an expert system to solve it.
     I'm beginning to suspect that knowledge engineering is more 
interviewing technique than computer science.

					John Nagle