What is an inference engine? - Question & Answer Book

 

Answer: An Inference Engine is a tool from Artificial Intelligence. The first in inference engines were components of expert systems. The typical expert system consisted of a knowledge base and an inference engine. The knowledge base stored facts about the world. The inference engine applied logical rules to the knowledge base and deduced new knowledge. This process would iterate as each new fact in the knowledge base could trigger additional rules in the inference engine. Inference engines work primarily in one of two modes: forward and backward chaining.