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DENDRAL
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DENDRAL

expert system
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Also known as: Heuristic DENDRAL
Written by
B.J. Copeland
Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Author of Artificial Intelligence and others.
B.J. Copeland
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Article History

DENDRAL, an early expert system, developed beginning in 1965 by the artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Edward Feigenbaum and the geneticist Joshua Lederberg, both of Stanford University in California. Heuristic DENDRAL (later shortened to DENDRAL) was a chemical-analysis expert system. The substance to be analyzed might, for example, be a complicated compound of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. Starting from spectrographic data obtained from the substance, DENDRAL would hypothesize the substance’s molecular structure. DENDRAL’s performance rivaled that of chemists expert at this task, and the program was used in industry and in academia.

B.J. Copeland