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“How DENDRAL Was Conceived and Born,” Joshua Lederberg, from A History of Medical Informatics, Bruce I. Blum and Karen Duncan, eds., 1990
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“How DENDRAL Was Conceived and Born,” Joshua Lederberg, from A History of Medical Informatics, Bruce I. Blum and Karen Duncan, eds., 1990
DENDRAL was the first artificial intelligence (AI) “expert system,” or computer program that simulates the judgement of a human expert in a topic. It was designed to analyze chemicals as proficiently as human chemists. On page 25, geneticist Joshua Lederberg (1925–2008) provides a diagram that shows how concepts are mapped in an expert system.