The Dipmeter Advisor was an early expert system

Expert system

In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, like an expert, and not by following the procedure of a developer as is the case in...

 developed in the 1980s by Schlumberger

Schlumberger

Schlumberger Limited is the world's largest oilfield services company. Schlumberger employs over 110,000 people of more than 140 nationalities working in approximately 80 countries...

  with the help of artificial-intelligence workers at MIT to aid in the analysis of data gathered during oil exploration

Oil exploration

Hydrocarbon exploration is the search by petroleum geologists and geophysicists for hydrocarbon deposits beneath the Earth's surface, such as oil and natural gas...

. The Advisor was generally not merely an inference engine

Inference engine

In computer science, and specifically the branches of knowledge engineering and artificial intelligence, an inference engine is a computer program that tries to derive answers from a knowledge base. It is the "brain" that expert systems use to reason about the information in the knowledge base for...

 and a knowledge base of ~90 rules, but generally was a full-fledged workstation, running on one of Xerox

Xerox

Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...

's 1100 Dolphin Lisp machine

Lisp machine

Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations...

s (or in general on Xerox's "1100 Series Scientific Information Processors" line) and written in INTERLISP-D

Interlisp

Interlisp was a programming environment built around a version of the Lisp programming language. Interlisp development began in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts as BBN LISP, which ran on PDP-10 machines running the TENEX operating system...

, with a pattern recognition

Pattern recognition

In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...

 layer which in turn fed a GUI

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 menu

Menu (computing)

In computing and telecommunications, a menu is a list of commands presented to an operator by a computer or communications system. A menu is used in contrast to a command-line interface, where instructions to the computer are given in the form of commands .Choices given from a menu may be selected...

-driven interface. It was developed by a number of people, including Reid G. Smith , James D. Baker , and Robert L. Young.

It was primarily influential not because of any great technical leaps, but rather because it was so successful for Schlumberger's oil divisions and because it was one of the few success stories of the AI bubble to receive wide publicity before the AI winter

AI winter

In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research. The process of hype, disappointment and funding cuts are common in many emerging technologies , but the problem has been particularly acute for AI...

.

The AI rules of the Dipmeter Advisor were primarily derived from Al Gilreath, a Schlumberger interpretation engineer who developed the "red, green, blue" pattern method of dipmeter interpretation.
Unfortunately this method had limited application in more complex geological environments outside the Gulf Coast, and the Dipmeter Advisor was primarily used within Schlumberger as a graphical display tool to assist interpretation by trained geoscientists, rather than as an AI tool for use by novice interpreters. However, the tool pioneered a new approach to workstation-assisted graphical interpretation of geological information.

Other Sources

• The AI Business: The commercial uses of artificial intelligence, ed. Patrick Winston
  Patrick Winston
  Patrick Henry Winston is an American computer scientist, and is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to found the MIT Media Lab and succeeded by Rodney Brooks...
  
   and Karen A. Prendergast. ISBN 0262730774
• "The Dipmeter Advisor: Interpretation of Geological Signals" - Randall Davis, Howard Austin, Ingrid Carlbom, Bud Frawley, Paul Pruchnik, Rich Sneiderman, J. A. Gilreath.

External links

• "The design of the Dipmeter Advisor system" -(at the ACM
  Association for Computing Machinery
  The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
  
  's website)