The power of expert systems came from the expert knowledge they contained . They was part of a new direction in AI research that had been gaining ground throughout the 70s . " AI researchers was beginning to suspect — reluctantly , for it violated the scientific canon of parsimony — that intelligence might very well be based on the ability to use large amounts of diverse knowledge in different ways , " write 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 .