Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Self-drilling and problem solving expert system--easy job!

I continue the topic of self-drilling introduced in my previous posting. Is the following flowchart familiar to you?



It's actually a finite state machine that represents a simple expert system driven by questions and aswers. In the database you can model the flowchart by using two tables: exp_state and exp_transition.



By using self-drilling reports and Voyant, I created an expert system OLAP model. See the following video:



It was quite easy. My solution is general. If you'd put thousands of questions and answers in the exp_state and exp_transition tables, it would work as perfectly as in the video. (There's no limit on the number of optional answers per question or the length of questions and answers.)

I call this a simple expert system, because a true expert system should allow fuzzy logic (probabilities between 0 and 1), which this system does not do. Also a true expert system should be able to calculate costs (or something else) based on the choices made by the user.

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