Report 78-25 Tutoring Rules for Guiding a Case Method

These knowledge bases are generally built by interviewing human experts to extract the knowledge they use to solve problems in their area of expertise. However, it is not clear that the organization and level of abstraction of this performance knowledge is suitable for use in a tutorial program. We are exploring this problem in the GUIDON tutorial program, using the knowledge bases of MYCIN-like expert systems. MYCIN is a knowledge-based program that provides consultations about infectious disease diagnosis and therapy (Shortliffe, 1974). In MN CIN, domain relations and facts take the form of rules about what to do in a given circumstance. A principle feature of this formalism is the separation of the knowledge base from the interpreter for applying it. This makes the knowledge accessible for multiple uses, including application to particular problems (i.e. for "performance") and explanation of reasoning (Davis, 1976). We have most recently used the MYC1N knowledge base as the foundation of a tutorial system, called GUIDON.