William J. Clancey

Origins The idea of developing a tutoring program from the MYCIN knowledge base was first described by Ted Shortliffe (1974). In fact, it was the mixed-initiative dialogue of the SCHOLAR teaching program (Carbonell, 1970) that inspired Shortliffe to produce the consultation dialogue of MYCIN. He conceived of it as a question-answer program in SCHOLAR's style, using a semantic network of disease knowledge. Shortly after I joined the MYCIN project in early 1975, Bruce Buchanan and I decided that developing a tutoring program would be my thesis project. The GUIDON program was operational in early 1979.