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The 640 MEG Shareware Studio 2
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The 640 Meg Shareware Studio CD-ROM Volume II (Data Express)(1993).ISO
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impshell.zip
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IMPDESC1.TXT
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1987-04-21
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SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE IMPSHELL -
AN EXPERT SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT
The IMP Shell is a powerful expert system development environment for
the IBM PC. It contains all the utilities needed to develop and test
new expert systems, and run them when they are finalized. All
functions are menu driven and appear in windows. IMP expert systems
are rule based, backwards chaining systems. They are very fast and
not limited by an artificially small number of rules.
The IMP Shell is in the public domain and is used in many educational
settings. It was developed by Daniel H. Marcellus of the Middletown
Programming Works, Middletown, N.Y. It is completely described in
the book:
D. Marcellus,
Expert Systems Programming in Turbo Prolog,
Prentice-Hall,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1987.
An expert system is a program which has captured the expertise of an
expert in some field and can deploy that expertise with seemingly
intelligent behavior. For instance there are expert systems to do
all these things:
diagnose medical problems
guide the repair of complex equipment
give advice about taxes and investments
guide chemists in synthesizing desired chemicals
interpret telemetry data from satellites
control nuclear reactors and electric utility grids
A shell makes it easy to set up an expert system by concentrating on
the problem at hand rather than on the details of a particular
machine reasoning system or artificial intelligence language. This
shell was written entirely in TURBO PROLOG, and the source code is
provided, although you don't need to understand anything about TURBO
PROLOG in order to set up an expert system with this software.
The IMP Shell is menu driven, and the menu allows you to select all
the activities that are necessary at various stages of the
development of an expert system, for example:
1. HELP information
2. MAKE rules for a new expert system
3. INSPECT the rule set that is loaded
4. SAVE the rule set that is loaded
5. LOAD an existing rule set
6. RUN the presently loaded rule set
7. EDIT an existing rule set
8. PRINT an existing rule set
9. DOS access
10. END this program
The IMP Shell uses backward reasoning. This means that it has the
proper architecture for creating good expert systems for
classification tasks, for troubleshooting, and, in general, for
anything that involves choosing among alternatives. It is not
the proper architecture for applications that require a well
defined sequence of steps with complex reasoning going into the
application of each step. Applications such as configuring complex
equipment or estimating costs of a project are of this sort. They
should be implemented with a forward chaining shell.