DENDRAL

The DENDRAL Project was one of the earliest expert systems. DENDRAL began as an effort to explore the mechanization of scientific reasoning and the formalization of scientific knowledge by working within a specific domain of science, organic chemistry. Another concern was to use AI methodology to understand better some fundamental questions in the philosophy of science, including the process by which explanatory hypotheses are discovered or judged adequate. After more than a decade of collaboration among chemists, geneticists, and computer scientists, DENDRAL had become not only a successful demonstration of the power of rule-based expert systems but also a significant tool for molecular structure analysis, in use in both academic and industrial research labs. Using a plan-generate-test search paradigm and data from mass spectrometry and other sources, DENDRAL proposes plausible candidate structures for new or unknown chemical compounds. Its performance rivals that of human experts for certain classes of organic compounds and has resulted in a number of papers that were published in the chemical literature. Although no longer a topic of academic research, the most recent version of the interactive structure generator, GENOA, has been licensed by Stanford University for commercial use. (1965-1983)