The Diversity of Artificial Intelligence: How Edward Feigenbaum Developed the Expert Systems
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad and diverse field that aims to create machines and systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as reasoning, learning, perception, decision making, and problem solving. AI is not a monolithic discipline, but rather a collection of subfields and approaches that have different goals, methods, and applications. One of the most influential and pioneering subfields of AI is the expert systems, which are computer programs that emulate the knowledge and reasoning of human experts in a specific domain. The expert systems were developed by Edward Feigenbaum, who is often called the “father of expert systems” and the joint winner of the 1994 ACM Turing Award.
Who is Edward Feigenbaum?
Edward Feigenbaum was born in 1936 in New Jersey to a culturally Jewish family. He was fascinated by his father’s adding machine and how it could reproduce human calculations. He attended Weehawken High School, where he chose a college preparatory program. He was inducted into his high school’s hall of fame in 1996.
Feigenbaum completed his undergraduate degree (1956) and a Ph.D. (1960) at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). In his Ph.D. thesis, he…
