Constant change, unpredictable human behavior, and a complexity that defies mastery by any single student make international relations a field no one—least of all a beginner—can cope with by simply memorizing facts. One key to understanding international relations—whether for the college freshman or a professional researcher—is knowing how to ask the right questions. Constructing and using expert systems can be a highly instructional pedagogical tool in this regard.

Expert systems are programs that reach conclusions based on a set of rules that examine evidence derived either from a database or from responses entered by the user to a series of canned questions. To design a truly “expert” system—one that reaches conclusions as reliable as those of a human expert—is an extremely time-consuming task requiring not only, obviously, the participation of an expert to formulate the rules but also a topic that can be reduced to rules. Such an endeavor is not the goal here.

Instead, the goal here is the preliminary step of training students to ask the proper questions, an arena in which expert systems running on PCs can be set up to provide very pointed demonstrations. Indeed, this is easy enough so that students can easily be assigned the design of such a system themselves (see box).