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2011 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
19. Help from Within
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Abstract
A general mechanism for self-explanation was a spin-off of Expert Systems Technology (EST) which attempted to mechanise human expertise using IT systems composed of a knowledge base (a database of rules and facts) and an inference engine (that deduces further information from user input and the knowledge base). It is persuasive in the small, but fails in the large. Just as with programs, the clarity of small context-free elements (program instructions or IF-THEN rules) is quickly lost when the system, or the purported explanation of the system, grows to be a large collection of these elements. The simplest explanation of a complex system may be complex (although hopefully less complex). Comprehensibility of complex explanations is probably best achieved (insofar as it can be achieved at all) through a combination of sophisticated structure and simple elements; it cannot be achieved through an unstructured mass of simple elements. A putative solution that is programmed, like self-explanation, is subject to all the same difficulties as the IT system it claims to explain.