Expert System

An early form of AI that encodes the knowledge of human experts as a set of explicit rules, which the system applies to reach conclusions or recommendations. Expert systems were the dominant AI paradigm through the 1970s and 1980s, finding practical use in medical diagnosis, legal reasoning, and engineering. They have largely been superseded by machine learning approaches, but remain in use in domains where rules are well-defined and interpretability is legally required.
See also: machine learning, Symbolic AI, AI winter.