The State of the Art
International grandmaster Arnold Denker studies the pieces on the board in front of him. He realizes there is no hope; he must resign the game. His opponent, Hitech, becomes the first computer program to defeat a grandmaster in a game of chess.
''I want to go from Boston to San Francisco,'' the traveller says into the microphone. ''What date will you be travelling on?'' is the reply. The traveller explains she wants to go October 20th, nonstop, on the cheapest available fare, returning on Sunday. A speech understanding program named Pegasus handles the whole transaction, which results in a confirmed reservation that saves the traveller $894 over the regular coach fare. Even though the speech recognizer gets one out of ten words wrong, it is able to recover from these errors because of its understanding of how dialogs are put together.
An analyst in the Mission Operations room of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory suddenly starts paying attention. A red message has flashed onto the screen indicating an ''anomaly'' with the Voyager spacecraft, which is somewhere in the vicinity of Neptune. Fortunately, the analyst is able to correct the problem from the ground. Operations personnel believe the problem might have been overlooked had it not been for Marvel, a real-time expert system that monitors the massive stream of data transmitted by the spacecraft, handling routine tasks and alerting the analysts to more serious problems.
Cruising the highway outside of Pittsburgh at a comfortable 55 mph, the man in the driver's seat seems relaxed. He should be--for the past 90 miles, he has not had to touch the steering wheel. The real driver is a robotic system that gathers input from video cameras, sonar, and laser range finders attached to the van. It combines these inputs with experience learned from training runs and successfully computes how to steer the vehicle.
A leading expert on lymph-node pathology describes a fiendishly difficult case to the expert system, and examines the system's diagnosis. He scoffs at the system's response. Only slightly worried, the creators of the system suggest he ask the computer for an explanation of the diagnosis. The machine points out the major factors influencing its decision, and explains the subtle interaction of several of the symptoms in this case. The expert admits his error, eventually.