For those who read this piece of news and don't understand why there is no mention of machine learning, neural networks and deep learning, that's because the system described is a typical fuzzy logic Expert System, a mainstay of Good, Old-Fashioned AI.<p>In short, it's a hand-crafted database of rules in a format similar to "IF Condition THEN Action" coupled to an inference procedure (or a few different ones).<p>That sort of thing is called an "expert system" because it's meant to encode the knowledge of experts. Some machine learning algorithms, particularly Decision Tree learners, were proposed as a way to automate this process of elicitation of expert knowledge and the construction of rules from it.<p>As to the "fuzzy logic" bit, that's a kind of logic where a fact is true or false by degrees. When a threshold is crossed, a fact becomes true (or false) or a rule "fires" and the system changes state, ish.<p>It all may sound a bit hairy but it's actually a pretty natural way of constructing knowledge-based systems that must implement complex rules. In fact, any programmer who has ever had to code complex business logic into a program has created a de facto expert system, even if they didn't call it that.<p>For those with a bit of time in their hand, this is a nice intro:<p><a href="http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS09/KI/folien/merritt.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS09/KI/folien/merritt.pdf</a>