Bruce Buchanan

American computer scientist and one of the founding figures of expert-systems AI, known for co-creating the DENDRAL system (with Edward Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg) and, with Edward Shortliffe, the MYCIN expert system and its certainty-factor uncertainty calculus.

Vault relevance: co-author of the 1975 paper defining CF[h,e] = MB[h,e] − MD[h,e], the ad hoc non-Bayesian scheme whose incoherence as a probability calculus is the mathematical hinge of this vault's rule-based-AI-to-Bayesian-networks thread (see claim-heckerman-1986-certainty-factors-require-independence-assumptions).

References

• claim-mycin-certainty-factors-non-bayesian-uncertainty — co-creator (with Shortliffe) of MYCIN's certainty factors, CF = MB − MD, built for rule-based diagnosis

• claim-heckerman-1986-certainty-factors-require-independence-assumptions — the original 1975 CF interpretation Heckerman's 1986 critique targets

• 2026-10-17: co-editor of Rule-Based Expert Systems (1984), the book whose Chapter 4 is now the vault's Tier-1 source for MYCIN's backward-chaining control structure (claim-mycin-backward-chaining-is-goal-directed-recursive-subgoal-search); see also the new system hub entity-mycin.