The Art of Artificial Intelligence: Themes and Case Studies of Knowledge Engineering

Edward A. Feigenbaum

Argues an expert system's power comes from the volume of domain-specific knowledge it encodes rather than the sophistication of its inference engine, coining 'knowledge engineering' for the work of extracting that knowledge.

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Where it is now wrong

The confidence that hand-built knowledge bases were the road to capable systems did not survive the expert-system contraction of the late 1980s. Read it for what the knowledge-engineering bet actually was, argued by the person who made it.

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FreeIntermediatelink checked 17 Sept 2026

Read these first

Not a difficulty warning — a route. These are in the library too.

Elements of a Theory of Human Problem SolvingAllen Newell, J. C. Shaw & Herbert A. Simon, 1958Models problem solving as search through a space of possible states guided by heuristics, formalised well enough to be run as a computer program that solves the same logic problems people do.

Filed under Classical & Symbolic AI in Artificial Intelligence.