“To be perfectly frank, I know nothing at all. And the name is J.J., if you don’t mind.”

“Yes, sir — J.J. Then if you will come with me I will bring you up to date a little bit.”

He led the way to an impressive array of apparatus that filled an entire laboratory bench. “This is not my work, it’s a project that Dr. Goldblum has under way. But it makes a perfect introduction to AI. The hardware isn’t much, it’s an old Macintosh SE/60 with a Motorola 68050 CPU and a data-base coprocessor that increases its execution speed by a factor of 100. The software itself is based on an updated version of a classic Self-Learning Expert System for renal analysis.”

“Just hold it there, son! I don’t know what a renal is. I know a little about Expert Systems, but what was it you said — a Self-Learning Expert System? You are going to have to go back and start at square A if you don’t want to lose me.”

Brian had to smile at this. “Sorry. You’re right, I better go back to the beginning. Renal refers to kidney functions. And Expert Systems, as you know, are knowledge-based programs for computers. What we call computer hardware is the machinery that just sits there. Turn off the electricity switch and all you have are a lot of expensive paperweights. Turn it on and the computer has just enough built-in programming to test itself to see if it is working all right, then it prepares to load in its instructions. These computer instructions are called software. These are the programs that you put in to tell the hardware what to do and how to do it. If you load in a word processing program you can then use the computer to write a book. Or if you load a bookkeeping program the same computer will do high-speed accountancy.”