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From: chuckm@willow129.cray.com (Charles Matthews)
Subject: Re: Q: expert system needed
Message-ID: <1995Feb18.154115.24803@driftwood.cray.com>
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Sender: chuckm@willow129 (Charles Matthews)
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Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
References: <1995Feb15.170930.10898@aristo.tau.ac.il> <5u648mX.predictor@delphi.com>
Date: 18 Feb 95 15:41:15 CST


In article <5u648mX.predictor@delphi.com>, Will Dwinnell <predictor@delphi.com> writes:
> Kshepitzki Gary <gary@libra.math.tau.ac.il> writes:
>  
> >I need some advice as for choosing an AI system.
> >We are running a very heavy application on a 486 PC with very
> >high CPU utilization. Our application is written in C and C++
> >and is interrupt driven (It has some characteristics of a
> >real time system).
> >We now want to add two AI features to the system. an expert system
> >and a natural language interpreter.
> >The natural language interpreter should understand a vocabulary
> >of 200 to 300 words.
>  
>  

Wait a minute! Your application is written in C and C++, it already shows high
CPU utilization on a 486 CPU, and now you are going to add an expert system 
and a natural language interpreter to it? 

In the first place, I hope that you really don't believe that you can just 
drop in an expert system and an NLP module as easily as if you are just adding a
couple of DLLs to your existing application with no side effects. These are 
not off the shelf components that you can re-package with your existing
application in a couple of day's work. If your current application is already
CPU intensive and you don't re-design it, the end result is probably going to 
run like an absolute dog! 

Before you spend the money on adding features (which by themselves are HEAVILY
computationally intensive) to a system which is already CPU limited, you 
should consider whether it makes any sense to do this at all. Will the resulting
system be usable with the higher performance degradation? Will the addition
of these two components require so much integration work that it would have
been easier to re-design the system from scratch? Is your existing design so
overburdened already, that its usefulness has already ended before you touch
any code at all? You really ought to think about these issues before you
attack this project. 

TRUST ME! If you add these two components and the resulting application is
PERCEIVED as being unusable, your users will blame the AI technology. And it
doesn't matter the least little bit that the existing app SHOULD have been
thrown out at the start. The last thing which is added will be blamed
for all of the problems. I've seen it happen many times before, and it has
nothing to with logic or reason or fairness. 


Regards,
Chuck Matthews
chuckm@sdiv.cray.com
-- 
Chuck Matthews
chuckm@sdiv.cray.com                          Cray Research, Inc. 
                                              655F Lone Oak Drive
(612)683-5385                                 Eagan, MN  55121
