Decision Support Systems in Agriculture: Some Successes and a Bright Future - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 295

Another effort, conducted by members of the TropSoil team of our study in Sumatra,
Indonesia, was the attempt to capture the similarities and differences among the local
people in contrast with the Transmigrants (Colfer et al., 1989). The results suggested that the
rule-based knowledge representation structure was not ideal to capture and structure the
information. It may have been that the knowledge was descriptive while the software was
designed to capture decisions built on goals and rule-based logic.

5. Contributions of artificial intelligence to decision-aid development

(Rich, 1983) defines artificial intelligence (AI) as “the study of how to make computers do
things at which, at the moment, people do better.” She goes on to list various topics of
interest (“problems”) as of the time of her topic that scientists in the field were working on:
- Knowledge representation
- Search strategies
- Reasoning methods
- Game playing
- Theorem proving
- General problem solving
- Perception (visual, speech)
- Natural language understanding
- Expert problem solving (Symbolic mathematics, Medical diagnosis, Chemical analysis,
Engineering design)
Of particular interest to the authors of this chapter was the type of “Expert problem solving”
of Medical diagnosis. This application of A.I. illustrates three contributions of A.I. to
agricultural knowledge: Knowledge representation , Search Strategies , and Reasoning Methods .

5.1 Characteristics of experts
Glaser and Chi (1988) suggest that experts often display the following characteristics
 Excel mainly in their own domains

 Perceive large meaningful patterns in their domain

 Work quickly. They are faster than novices in performing the skills of their domain

 Have superior short term and long term memory



See and represent a problem in their domain at a deeper (more principled) level than
novices

 Spend a great deal of time analyzing a problem qualitatively

 Have strong self-monitoring skills

5.2 Knowledge representation
One of the first systems to carry out medical diagnosis was the software Mycin (Hayes-Roth
et al., 1983) , which used a rule-based system to record and exercise expert knowledge. Rule-
based systems were constructed from a sequence of “if then” statements illustrated as
follows:
1. If Blood temperature is warm and method of reproduction is live
Then Animal = mammal
2. If Blood temperature is warm and method of reproduction is eggs
Then Animal = bird