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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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NOTES761.TXT
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1987-05-03
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Program name: IMP-shell
Author name: Daniel H. Marcellus
Middletown, N.Y.
Suggested donation: Public domain
Program description:
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, New York. It is completely described in the
book "Expert Systems Programming in Turbo Prolog" which is written by
Mr. Marcellus, and published by 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.