systems

Potential for change James Martin talks about expert systems and the future of programming

by MARLENE BROWN

6 D

PMs who want to survive

should draw together a view of how he or she wants the

company to look in five years time and give serious consideration to compre- hensive networking and the integra- tion of the DP network and the telephone. The most important skill will be the ability to communicate well with the managing director, be-

cause the managing director ,today has to build a computerized organization and needs a lot of help from his top management information services manager. ’ So says James Martin, guru, communicator and head of James Martin Associates, a Bermuda- based DP consultancy.

Importance of expert systems

Expert systems are an important in- gredient in this five-year plan, he says. ._.

Abstract:James Martin, guru and communicator on DI-’ topics, says that evey corporation has problems crying out for expert system solutions, but is suffering from lack of expertise. He also sees enormous potential for expert system to change society.

Most important change, though, in the DP world is the prediction that the programmer’s job is to be automated. Systems people will be seen sitting at graphics terminals mapping out complex logic and applications will be programmed using fourth generation languages. For this reason, Martin believes that Alvey and Esprit are on the wrong track in their support of projects concentrating on the needs of the programmer.

Keywords: data processing, #expert systems, fourth generation languages.

hlarlene Brown is a technical1 journalist.

‘In every corporation today there are

applications crying out for expert systems’

‘In every corporation today there are

applications crying out for expert systems but the problem is a shortage of people who know about them and can build them. I would estimate that there are only 500 in the USA yet the technology is here and there is a lot of money to be made.’ Martin calculates

that at present, there are no more than 200 different types of working expert systems. Most of these relate to intel- lectually complex problems, whereas the world around us contains a num- ber of problems which, if we could solve them, would have a high finan- cial pay off, he argues.

Martin refers to such financially successful applications today as Pros- pector, a Stanford PhD thesis for identifying potential sites for mineral deposits. He recounts how one min- ing company was so sceptical of this program that it challenged the com- puter to a mineral finding contest. The computer found $lOOM worth of minerals and the resulting profit came to more than the total expenditure on all expert systems research.

Martin observes that both the DEC Rl system for configuring complex systems and Drilling Advisor, which is an oil rig problem solving package, took three years to develop. Yet Drilling Advisor paid back the money

invested in development within four weeks of startup.

‘These systems all obey the basic

parameters essential for a successul expert system. They operate only in a narrow domain of knowledge, use knowledge and inference procedures to solve problems, can solve problems intractable to conventional DP tech- niques, perform better than most humans in their domain and are capable of being questioned by hu- mans.

‘Expert systems need a language to express such rules. In the USA the choice is LISP, while Europe and Japan have gone for PROLOG. So comparing LISP and PROLOG is like comparing assembly with a fourth generation language. LISP is precise and powerful but not user friendly, while PROLOG is a declarative lan- guage. It expresses rules and facts

easily, is very user friendly, can yield to parallel processing - which is one of the main reasons why the Japanese chose it. But PROLOG is not as precise as LISP,’ Martin argues, and adds that he is more inclined to regard PROLOG

as the fourth generation language of artificial intelligence.

At present, PROLOG can run on the Apple II at 8 logical instructions/s (Lips), VAX 780 at 1500 Lips, 3081 at 67000 Lips and the DEC 2060 at 43 000 Lips. It will be running on PCs by the end of the year. The Japanese PC target is to run PROLOG on a PC at 1.5 times the speed of an IBM 308 1.

By 1992, they aim to run at 15 000 times the speed of an IBM 3081, calling for between 1000 and 10000

\0127 no 4 may 1985 0011-684X/85/040035-03$03.00 @ 19R5 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd. 35

processors operating in parallel. An intelligent interface will handle a speech vocabulary of 50000 words, dealing with multiple speakers and performing recognition at three times real time speech. ‘This is really a

tough target but I suspect the reaction to the Japanese that will really pay off will be the response of entrepreneurs, rather than big corporations,’ Martin

says. When asked how expert systems

will be used in the typical commercial corporation, Martin replies that the acid test for expert system usage is the question, ‘Could this problem be solved by an expert on the telephone?’

He foresees a greatly increased skill

level in DP and a syndication of scarce expertise. The expert system will solve problems that have a vast num- ber of possibilities and make complex

systems error proof. He refers to the most expensive and notorious com- puter error, the Three Mile Island.

‘That accident caused 180 power sta- tions to be cancelled at a loss of $1-5 billion, yet in the accident report it said that if the computer had self- destructed it would never have hap- pened. Expert systems will make

complex machines easier to use, re- pair, maintain and modify; decision support will be greatly increased and knowledge may be converted into a competitive edge,’ he says.

When exactly should one avoid

implementing expert systems? James Martin says: ‘Do not use them when problems are excessively combina- torial or cannot be broken down into segments - each segment should be designable in three weeks. Be wary of systems with bad corporate politics or when people ask for magic’.

Martin sees enormous potential for expert systems to change our society. We could see them used for medical diagnosis and therapy recommenda- tions, codifying the law and prece- dents, in domestic robots and genetic engineering applications. ‘Perhaps the most important message I have is that as we develop technological potential

‘As we develop technological potential we must develop our

human potential as well’

we must develop our human potential

as well. Today is an age without philosophies, it is an age of engineers. I cannot think of one sociologist who would understand what we have spoken about today. Yet we are mov- ing at a dangerous speed.’

Automating the programmer’s job

Computer people, Martin observes, have automated everyone’s job except their own. People who build applica- tions have to deal with fairly complex logic. Systems analysis of the future will be drawn on a computer, will be checked by computer and will be automatically converted to code. Pro- grammers will disappear and instead we will see systems analysts sitting in

front of a graphics screen, designing complex logic.

Martin predicts that tomorrow’s systems analysts will deal with data- base-driven commercial applications. They will use graphics terminals to map out information flows using the data derived from a corporate data- base. There will be software tools to check the correctness of these gra- phical specifications, and from these

specifications, the code generators will automatically turn out code that will work the first time.

‘I would like to automate more, to generate code and not to have to program in c,' Martin says. He main- tains that on the hardware front, this task would need a PC which has much better graphics than the IBM, with a high pixel density. ‘A 16 bit computer is fine, but the screen is the big problem,’ he says and suggests that monochrome displays could be used, although colour would obviously be

advantageous for representing com- plex logic.

Martin’s consultancy has already developed some of the modules and tools to the prototype stage and Mar- tin himself is talking to the UK’s Alvey directorate about funding for the $lOM fifth generation develop- ment project. ‘I am absolutely deter-

mined to build these things and would like anyone to fund it,’ Martin said. Yet he is highly critical of Alvey, ‘One of the problems is that it is a closed user group. They do not know what is going on in the rest of the world and their advisers do not relate to what is happening in real US corporations.

They have never heard of higher order software and it seems to me that Alvey understands third generation, claims to understand fifth generation, but makes no mention of fourth generation. I would like to get them to change direction, to highlight the systems analysts workbench which is not understood at all’.

Future predictions

In the future, Martin believes that the average DP manager will find these changes will give him or her the ability to build faster, more reliable and easily maintained applications. To maximize DP productivity today, the DPM must be looking at applica- tion generators. ‘The difference in third and fourth generation languages is a large rise in productivity, yet lots of DPMs did not keep up with the jump from second to third genera- tion,’ he says.

‘Here in the United States, a num- ber of consultants are making out like bandits using fourth generation lan- guages. They follow Arthur Andersen around and where it bids $2M, they come in at $1 ‘/zM and then they develop the application in four weeks. Then to ensure that the user does not think he is being ripped off, they leave it on the shelf for one or two months,’ he jokes.

Continued on page 39

36 data processing

systems

information from telephone, facsi- mile, computer data, videotex, tele- meter, telecontrol, etc to be trans- mitted3.

In this network, all the information

would pass through the same com- munication processing centre and the same transmission link such as fibre optic cables, microwaves and satel- lites. Companies in Japan and many other countries are engaged in this task. In particular, Japan is reported to be planning to test its model of this new communication system deve-

loped by the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Carp*.

During the pilot test of this system, the company will, among other things, be studying how a variety of services, including video transmis- sion, could affect personal life, social life and the economy. In addition, since the network system would be fully digital, the company would also be looking at whether a unified tariff based on the amount of information

(or bits) transmitted is acceptable to the public users, instead of the usual tariffs based on the distance spanned and the duration of the connection.

If the new tariff based on the quantity of information proves to be acceptable, it would definitely solve the present problem of having to

charge subscribers separately for the videotex pages and for the telephone time taken to access videotex.

The disabled community should not be forgotten, in particular the blind people. Ways of making video- tex available to them should also be considered. Already some efforts in this direction have been made” which

require enhancement.

Conclusion

In this paper some suggestions have been made towards enhancing video- tex internationally. Videotex has a lot to offer to the business community as well as for education. However, be-

fore the full potential of videotex can be employed internationally, there is need for a unified standard for the generation, transmission and recep- tion of videotex data.

References Clarke, K E ‘International stand- ards for videotex codes’ Proc. ZEE

Vol 126 No 12 (Dec. 1979) pp 1355-l 361

Kuwabara, M ‘Japan tests its model communications systems’ IEEE Spectrum Vol 21 No 5 (May 1984) pp 53-56

Kaplan, G ‘Japan’s Information Network System’ IEEE Spectrum

Vol 21 No 5 (May 1984) pp 50-52 Staisey, N L, Tombauch, J W and Dillon, R F ‘Videotex and the disabled’ Znt. J. Man-Machine Studies Vol 17 (1982) pp 35-50

0

Electrical Engineering Department, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Potential for change Gmrinued from page 36

Martin refers to the successful use of fourth generation languages at Yale University where the university was having problems with its financial management systems. A series of six prototypes were built using Focus, with users being given the opportu- nity to criticize the system at each stage. By the time the sixth modifica- tion came along, it was very difficult for users to find anything wrong with

it. So, the whole process took six months where with traditional tools it would have taken two years and still would not have been what they wanted. So Yale banned third genera- tion languages, which was rather iro- nic because the computer sciences department had never heard of fourth generation.

‘Even now, fourth generation lan- guages could be more efficient if they were generating machine language, but a lot of customers, hankering after comfort, want them to generate WBOL,’ Martin says.

He estimates that one of the most useful ways for DP departments to use these applications generators is in the information centre environment, supporting end user computing. Here, the DP staff help end users to develop the applications they require, that are not redundant and incorpor- ate the correct representation of data. ‘They are making sure the systems they build will work together,’ he says.

‘Originally, there were hopes that a reduction in the applications backlog would be seen but in the US where more progress has been made, this has not been the case. What it has done is make end users realise how a compu-

ter can help them and made them far more literate. Now their imaginations are working, often to the extent that the applications backlog is being in- creased.’

Europe

Martin thinks that the concerted and

costly European effort in software

engineering may be on the wrong track, which means that the European effort could well fail to achieve its goal of keeping European computer makers abreast of their US and Japan- ese competitors in putting fifth gener- ation computers onto the market.

‘Whereas Alvey and Esprit are con- centrating on the needs of the profes- sional programmer who is well versed in advanced programming languages and techniques, the trend in the DP marketplace is toward automatically generated programs,’ Martin says. ‘Therefore, there is a great need for awareness in the UK of some of the most powerful tools currently avail- able for automating software develop- ment. The British government is spending money on the programmer’s workbench and that’s the wrong approach - these programmers are going to become redundant, so Bri- tain ought to be developing systems designers’. 0

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