How to make a machine think in art psychotherapy: An expert system's reasoning process

Abstract

In making decisions, a human being considers all of the factors concerning the situation in a comprehensive and intuitive manner by using all of his or her experience and knowledge. Due to the inherent nature of human decision making, the reasoning process from confronting the problem to finding a solution is too complicated to be explicitly represented. In this paper, we implement an expert system for the diagnosis process of art psychotherapists. We model the complicated mechanism of this process as several procedural stages and feedbacks. We devise a suitable method of maintaining consistency among numerous decisions derived from the system. We also provide the system with a learning facility to improve its intelligence. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness and suitability of the proposed system through a case study. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.