 The power of expert systems came from the expert knowledge they contained . They were part of a new direction in AI research that had been gaining ground throughout the 70s . " AI researchers were beginning to suspect — <unk> , for it violated the scientific canon of <unk> — that intelligence might very well be based on the ability to use large amounts of diverse knowledge in different ways , " writes Pamela McCorduck . " [ T ] he great lesson from the 1970s was that intelligent behavior depended very much on dealing with knowledge , sometimes quite detailed knowledge , of a domain where a given task lay " . Knowledge based systems and knowledge engineering became a major focus of AI research in the 1980s . 
