There are good reasons why MYCIN and similar systems were never accepted, mainly the fact that diagnosing an infectious disease is pretty useless on it's own. If the doctor has already narrowed it down to an infectious disease, telling which one it is is trivial. The hard part is getting there.
>... diagnosing an infectious disease is pretty useless on it's own.
I don't think that was what was being measured.
The evaluation was a comparison of:
>...MYCIN's choice of antimicrobials with the choices of nine human prescribers for ten test cases of meningitis.
In that evaluation:
>...MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65% by the evaluators; the corresponding ratings for acceptability of the regimen prescribed by the five faculty specialists ranged from 42.5% to 62.5%.
The fact that the acceptability ratings of the five faculty specialists ranged from 42.5% to 62.5% implies that this isn't a trivial problem.
