Notes on an Expert System for Capital Budgeting
记录了一个1984年启动的资本预算专家系统的开发过程，该系统于1986年发布，旨在帮助企业进行资本投资决策，并强调了实际应用中的经验教训。
0 In Summer 1984, a venture capital-backed startup company began design and programming of an expert for corporate capital investment decision making. The group building included management, financial staff, systems analysts, and programmers, plus several outside consultants. (I was principal academic expert in finance.) The first version of what I will call the system was released in March 1986, after several months' testing in offices of early customers. An improved, extended version was released in December 1986. The is a modest commercial success. Roughly 20 companies have purchased it, despite its relatively high cost. (The single-copy price of first release was $66,000. Moreover, was programmed in LISP, and early versions required specialized Symbolics or Texas Instruments computers.) The lessons learned from this are more about application than theory. We had to design a that would help and advise, as well as compute. Consequently, we had to teach to recognize appropriate relationships, to carry out consistency checks, and to explain what it does. We also had to teach it to acquire information about basic economics of user's business, and to feed that information back into discounted cash flow (DCF) calculations.