By Prof. Patrick Heny Winston

I came across these principles when learning the course - Artificial Intelligence. These principles were enumerated by the Professor when he was explaining about building Rule-Based Expert Systems. The problem was to build a grocery packing machine. Here are the following 3 principles:

  1. Ask about specific cases. Know the specifics to gather knowledge that the expert (the grocery packing expert in our case) would not have thought to give you.
  2. Ask questions about the things that appear to be the same, but are handled differently
  3. Build a system and see when it cracks

The above set of rules, as explained by the professor, are also the rules that we unknowingly apply while trying to learn anything new or trying to build something. We also are, in a very simplified form, an expert system trying to learn about things.