Dendral

The Dendral system was created back in 1965, it is the oldest system called expert. DENDRAL appeared at Stanford University and is the result of the joint efforts of computer experts and a group of experts in the field of chemistry. Edward Feigenbaum is considered the creator. The Dendral expert system was one of the first to use the heuristic knowledge of specialists to achieve the level of expert in solving complex problems.

The user gives the Dendral system some information about the substance, as well as spectrometry data (infrared, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry), and it in turn issues a diagnosis in the form of the corresponding chemical structure. The process, often referred to as “generation and verification,” allows you to constantly reduce the number of possible options considered so that at any time it is as small as possible. Dendral also includes programs that help the user discard some hypotheses and apply others, using knowledge of the relationship between the mass spectrometer readings and the structure of the compound’s molecules. For example, the MSPRUNE program eliminates those hypotheses that suggest fragmentation variants that do not coincide with the data obtained from the mass spectrometer.

Unlike some expert systems, DENDRAL is not designed as a “toy”. It is not used only to verify the theoretical foundations of expert systems, but is actually used to determine chemical structures. Over 20 scientific papers have been written on the results of the DENDRAL system with real tasks. It is said that in her field she can argue with human experts.

• Chastikov A.P., Gavrilova T.A., Belov D.L. Development of expert systems. Wednesday CLIPS-SPb.: BHV-Petersburg, 2003.
• Naylor K. How to build your own expert system: Per. from English.-M.: ENERGOATOMIZDAT, 1991.