Mac made intelligent

AI Magazine 

I should like to lodge a complaint about your editorial standards in the article "An Assessment of Tools for Building Large KB Systems," by William Mettrey, in the winter 1987 [volume 9 number As a primary architect of CRL-Ops and a former KnowledgeCraft class instructor, I had to deal with the general public's misconceptions about forward versus backward chaining systems. Mr. Mettrey's article, in my opinion, is the type which generates the confusion that forward chaining rule systems cannot "backwards chain." This nonsensical view was held by the vast majority of our customers in the KC class. The section on Rule-Based inference implies that backward chaining is done only by Prolog in KC with its statement "by contrast, Knowledge-Craft implements backward chaining by supporting a version of Prolog." Any forward chaining rules system can efficiently implement constrained backward chaining by simply using a goal structure to search for the required knowledge.