PROSPECTOR was an expert system developed at Stanford in the late 1970s to evaluate geological sites for potential mineral deposits. In 1984 it was instrumental in discovering a molybdenum deposit worth 100 million dollars.
PROSPECTOR was based on a semantic network and used a combination of mostly forward chaining and some backward chaining. It adopted a form of depth first search guided by the probabilities of different hypotheses and used Bayes Theorem to deal with uncertainty. The dialogue component and explanation component used mixed control.
Used in Chap. 3: page 28; Chap. 18: page 276
Used in glossary entries: backward reasoning, Bayes Theorem, depth first search, dialogue component, explanation component, forward reasoning, semantic network