The Dipmeter Advisor was an early

expert system In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if� ...

developed in the 1980s by

Schlumberger Schlumberger Limited (), doing business as SLB, is an oilfield services company. Schlumberger has four principal executive offices located in Paris, Houston, London, and The Hague. Schlumberger is the world's largest offshore drilling compa ...

with the help of artificial-intelligence workers at MIT to aid in the analysis of data gathered during oil exploration. The Advisor was generally not merely an

inference engine In the field of artificial intelligence, an inference engine is a component of the system that applies logical rules to the knowledge base to deduce new information. The first inference engines were components of expert systems. The typical expert ...

and a knowledge base of ~90 rules, but generally was a full-fledged workstation, running on one of Xerox's 1100 Dolphin Lisp machines (or in general on Xerox's "1100 Series Scientific Information Processors" line) and written in

INTERLISP-D Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language Lisp. Interlisp development began in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (renamed BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, ...

, with a pattern recognition layer which in turn fed a

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to customers and the prices. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-established seque ...

-driven interface. It was developed by a number of people, including Reid G. Smith, James D. Baker, and Robert L. Young. It was primarily influential not because of any great technical leaps, but rather because it was so successful for Schlumberger's oil divisions and because it was one of the few success stories of the AI bubble to receive wide publicity before the AI winter. The AI rules of the Dipmeter Advisor were primarily derived from Al Gilreath, a Schlumberger interpretation engineer who developed the "red, green, blue" pattern method of dipmeter interpretation. Unfortunately this method had limited application in more complex geological environments outside the Gulf Coast, and the Dipmeter Advisor was primarily used within Schlumberger as a graphical display tool to assist interpretation by trained geoscientists, rather than as an AI tool for use by novice interpreters. However, the tool pioneered a new approach to workstation-assisted graphical interpretation of geological information.

References

Other sources

*''The AI Business: The commercial uses of artificial intelligence'', ed. Patrick Winston and Karen A. Prendergast.
"The Dipmeter Advisor: Interpretation of Geological Signals"
– Randall Davis, Howard Austin, Ingrid Carlbom, Bud Frawley, Paul Pruchnik, Rich Sneiderman, J. A. Gilreath.

External links

"The design of the Dipmeter Advisor system"
-(at the

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's website) Petroleum engineering {{science-software-stub