Expert system in 1832

The reader of the homeoscope.ru site is immediately surprised to learn that in 1832 a Russian nobleman named Simon Nikolaevich Korsakov submitted to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg a petition to consider his methods and inventions, among which there were five machines on punched cards encoding knowledge bases and algorithms for simple comparison of objects by features.

Of course, the computing power of the Korsakov machine cannot be compared with the inventions of his contemporary Charles Babbage (which, according to an article in the Russian- language Wikipedia , in 1832, became a foreign correspondent member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg) capable of quite complex mathematical calculations.

Nevertheless, Korsakov’s idea of ​​automating a medical diagnosis and issuing a prescription deserves, I think, attention.