Generalizing MYCIN

One of the reasons for undertaking the original MYCIN experiment was to test the hypothesis that domain-specific knowledge could successfully be kept separate from the inference procedures. We felt we had done just that in the original implementation; specifically, we believed that knowledge of a new domain, when encoded in rules, could be substituted for MYCIN's knowledge of infectious diseases and that no changes to the inference procedures were required to produce MYCIN-like consultations. In the fall of 1974 Bill van Melle began to investigate our claim seriously. He wrote (van Melle, 1974): The MYCIN program for infectious disease diagnosis claims to be general. One ought to be able to take out the clinical knowledge and plug in knowledge about some other domain.