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>> Those systems sort-of, kind-of worked,

Rather more than that. For a famous example, check out the wikipedia article on MYCIN (a classic of the era):

MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin

There were many practical reasons why expert systems fell out of grace (although like others say they are still used widely, in real-world applications) but a large part of them was political, rather than anything to do with their effectiveness.

Some historical background:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3454567_Avoiding_An...

In the end, the problem with expert systems was probably that they didn't scale as well as one would hope -primarily because it's damn hard to develop and maintain huge hand-crafted databases of knowledge solicited by experts who have very little incentive to collaborate in the creation of a system that will put them out of work.



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