Decision Support Systems for Business Intelligence, Second Edition

Chapter 4S. INTELLIGENCE AND DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Since the establishment of computers as business tools, designers have planned for the day when systems could work on their own, either as decision makers or as partners in the decision-making effort. Computers such as these would use "artificial intelligence." In this context, we are using the term artificial intelligence to mean the emulation of human expertise by the computer through the encapsulation of knowledge in a particular domain and procedures for acting upon that knowledge. The advantage of such artificial intelligence is that the computers would not be prone to the forgetfulness, bias, or distractions that plague human decision makers. Such systems would help us make better decisions, protect us from unanticipated events, and even provide companionship of a sort as the computer played games such as chess with us. Unfortunately, many factors ranging from unreasonable expectations to insufficient developments in hardware stood in the way of this goal.

During the 1980s, when smaller, faster processors and storage media were first becoming available, many thought the area of "expert systems" would provide a focused use of artificial intelligence and solve problems that usually could be tamed only by an expert or group of experts, because they required a human reasoning process. This required computers to use symbols in the analysis and to understand, interpret, and manipulate the symbols just as humans do. Such systems ...