BusTUC – a savant level intelligent bus oracle

A natural language bus route expert system has been developed during the last 12 years. It is bilingual and has up to now answered millions of questions about the bus departures in Trondheim.What it seems is that the system has reached a level of a savant. This claim is discussed in the paper, drawing some lines into its future development. BusTUC – a natural language bus oracle A natural language bus route expert system has been developed during the last 12 years. The so-called bus oracle BusTUC (Bratseth 1997),(BusTUC,1998) was installed in 1998 at the bus company Team Trafikks website (Team Trafikk,1998) and has been in daily use since then. It has answered more than 3 million queries so far, in Norwegian and English, and there are no reports of any system with similar capabilities. Route information systems exist all over the country. They are characterized by a small set of fixed format entries lik