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The present book is an introductory text book on the undergraduate level, covering the subject of expert systems for students of computer science. The major motive for writing this book was a course on expert systems given by the first author to third and fourth year undergraduate computer science students at the University of Amsterdam for the first time in 1986. Although at that time already a large number of books on expert systems was available, none of these were considered to be suitable for teaching the subject to a computer science audience. The present book was written in an attempt to fill this gap. The central topics in this book are formalisms for the representation and manipulation of knowledge in the computer, in a few words: logic, production rules, semantic nets, frames, and formalisms for plausible reasoning. The choice for the formalisms discussed in the present book, has been motivated on the one hand by the requirement that at least the formalisms which nowadays are of fundamental importance to the area of expert systems must be covered, and on the other hand, that the formalisms which have been in use for considerable time and have laid the foundation of current research into more advanced methods should also be treated. We have in particular paid attention to those formalisms which have been shown to be of practical importance for building expert systems. As a consequence, several other subjects, for example truth maintenance systems and non-standard logics, are not covered or merely briefly touched upon. These topics have only become a subject of investigation in recent years, and their importance to the area of …