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Show Slick sales kits promise to turn your expertise into money-making software UThe : yjI8usiness Computer "" b.v Fr.nkl.vnn Pwrson and Judy K.Tlirktl We thought we'd missed a new, important advance in computer intelligence in-telligence when our eyes landed on the ad that began, "Your knowledge can be sold." Sounding almost like a franchise deal, it promised that for a mere two grand we could turn our brainpower into green power via computer,'.:;" We phoned at once. The sales kit arrived with a letter promising that if we applied, describing our idea for a software package, and were approved by the company's Certified Developer Program, Pro-gram, we'd have our . expertise translated into marketable software in a months Packed with it were glowing reprints from the Journal of Financial Software, PC Week and PC magazine. It looked like they'd all beaten us down the yellow brick road to the Wizard of Expertdom. One article told how an average company manager used the $2,000 kit to design a system that trained his personnel in an entire industry's complex rules and regulations. Another told how easily its author had created his own expert knowledge bank using the "expert development tool" while carefully skirting the issue of how much time he'd spent making his expert system. Maybe we'd started late, but we persisted in our usual slow and meticulous manner. We ordered this company'd two-disk expert system and one from another company com-pany pushing the same instant ex- We couldn't sell it on street comers. We had no desire to become software soft-ware wholesalers or hire a network of sales people. Peddlers of the two-grand two-grand mail order expert kit carefully careful-ly dodge the question of who's going to market your product, but the fine print warns that they won't be the ones. For grins, we knocked together our own homemade "expert" system and asked it whether or not to buy into the $2,000 "market-your-expertise" deal. The clever program answered, "Not on your life!" Needing no assistance from any system, we compiled a profile of the person most likely to create an expert ex-pert system product worth marketing vigorously: someone highly trained in deductive logic, highly trained and experienced in computer programming, highly trained and widely recognized as an expert in some field and rich. The authors will answer questions and send a checklist of available back issues. Send a stamped, self-addressed self-addressed envelope. . A new 4,000-word special report, "Educatinal Programs for Children," gives details on price and performance of computer-age products pro-ducts for children. For your copy, send a $3 check payable to Newspaperbooks for Report FP01 in ' care of the Park Record, P.O. Box 3688, Park City, UT 84060. (c) 1985 PK Associates, Inc. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Ser-vices, Inc. pertise. When the boxes arrived, we peeled off their shrink wrap and studied their manuals. Despite the fact that two fine programming languages have been developed specifically for artificial intelligence and expert systems, one maker was using old-timer Pascal and the other had written its own brand new language. To use the expert systems, you had to master deductive reasoning and learn these programming languages no mean feat since the thin manuals covered them only superficially. College students spend semesters with expert teachers learning this kind of stuff. Here we found just enough information to let the wise know how little they knew about either subject and to make the unwise unwary enough to believe they knew it all. But, all the sales literature seemed seem-ed to say, the manuals are unimportant unimpor-tant because the easy-to-run programs pro-grams do the job for you. So we followed the manual's instuctions and wrote an outline for the program we wanted to create, "A guide on how to buy computers and soft ware." We loaded the expert-making programsand pro-gramsand discovered that while one installed easily enough, the other made us first install the oddball odd-ball p-system operating system it came with (instead of AppleDos, PC DOS, MS DOS or CPM). That's quite a delicate feat on hard disk computers. Once the systems and programs were loaded, we had to type in the information in-formation that we, as experts, wanted the computer to have as its expert knowledge. We spent two days entering our expertise, with little lit-tle help from the program, and barely bare-ly started on our list. We stopped there and tested whether the program could make an expert of non-experts. Lo and behold, it did ask the questions we had told it fo ask. Big deal. And the computer screen had so many tiny windows, we could see only a few lines of each question or answer at a time. That made the process run like a bear in a molasses vat. When our patience ran out, we began to muse about what we'd do with our program once it was done. |
