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Experiences with EXGAME: an expert system for playing a competitive business game

This paper looks at expert systems in management, by using a business game as an experimental vehicle. An expert system called EXGAME was developed to play a business game, which is normally played by students, with minimal human intervention. This paper concentrates on the effectiveness of EXGAME as compared with human players for tasks at different levels. EXGAME was able to replace human players in decision making at the operational level, and indeed outperform them. However, it proved to be impractical to replace human input at the strategic level. The paper also sheds some light on the problems of trying to build an expert system when there is no real expert. A combination of a modular knowledge-base structure and a process of ‘learning by experimentation’ was effective in this case; it is suggested that this may be an appropriate development strategy in other similar situations. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.