An Expert System for Identification of Minerals in Thin Section.

We have developed a microcomputer-based expert system designed to aid in the identification of minerals in thin section. The program is coded in Turbo PASCAL and runs on any PC with 128K RAM and MS-DOS; windows and menus are used to provide a user-friendly environment. The knowledge base of the program currently includes optical properties of 142 minerals. The inference engine (that is, the reasoning mechanism) employed in the program is based on “fuzzy” logic, which allows identification of minerals from incomplete and imprecise information.