Although expert systems and knowledge engineering are attracting great attention there is still confusion about what they are. Most expert systems deal with problems which are familiar to other disciplines and their distinctive character is not always recognised. This tutorial describes the origins of expert systems in Artificial Intelligence, and the technical concept of “knowledge”. The central feature is the ideal of explicitly representing knowledge as facts, rules and other symbolic structures, rather than the traditional representation as abstract numbers or algorithms. These developments yield new solutions to old problems, and ways of solving problems whcih have previously been thought to be the preserve of the human intellect.

The relentless growth of the computer industry over more than 30 years has been driven on by a series of major innovations. High-level languages; solid-state logic; compatible machine ranges; disk storage; time-sharing; data communications; virtual machine architectures; the use of LSI and solid-state memory; text processing; personal computers; sucessful packaged software; each advance in its turn has opened up new markets and set off a new spurt of expansion. A vital conclusion of this study is that expert systems promise to be another such major innovation.

The Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project has chosen logic programming for its core programming language. It has recognized the major contribution that logic programming has to make not only in artificial intelligence but in database systems and software specification as well. It has recognized and intends to exploit the greater potential that logic programming has to offer for taking advantage of the parallelism possible with innovative multiprocessor computer architectures.