# MCC Proteus Project (archived copy of Charles Petrie's page) His account of the Proteus project he led at MCC from 1984, last modified in December 2001. Source: http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~petrie/proteus.html. Captured 2026-09-14. MCC Proteus Project Proteus was a hybrid reasoning and representation project at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). It started in the AI Lab directed by Woody Bledsoe. Charles Petrie was the official Project Leader, and specialized in Dependency-Directed Backtracking. David Russinoff was the principal architect. Donald Steiner was the other original member of the project who contributed initial ideas, the user interface, integration of systems, and general systems testing, debugging, and improvements. The first version was released as MCC Document MCC/AI/TR-0101-05 in 19851. In later years, the project was led by Elaine Rich. Other members of the project at various later times include Michael Huhns, Nathanial Ballou, Vasant Dhar, Natraj Arni, Michael Gray, David Bridgeland, James Christian, James Shea, MunindarSingh, William Schelter, and Shiuh-li Liuh. The project is reviewed as a case study in Chapter 5 of R&D Collaboration on Trial by David V. Gibson and Everett M. Rogers (c)1994. The project produced an advanced expert system shell that combined frames with inheritance, forward and backward chaining rules, an advanced Truth Maintenance System2, and Dependency-Directed Backtracking with fix rules3 that led to Redux4. The system was used in the first commercial product based on MCC technology: the NCR Design Advisor, developed by Robin Steele5. 1This and most other releases were company confidential. One early non-confidential report was "Proteus 2: System Description", C. Petrie, D. Russinoff, D. Steiner, and N. Ballou, MCC TR AI-136-87, 1987. 2Russinoff, D., "An Algorithm for Truth Maintenance," MCC Technical Report AI/TR-062-85, 1985. 3Petrie, C., "Revised Dependency-Directed Backtracking for Default Reasoning", Proc. AAAI-87, pp. 167-172, AAAI Press, July 1987. Also MCC TR AI-002-87. 4Petrie, C., "Constrained Decision Revision", Proc. AAAI-91, pp. 393-400, AAAI Press, July 1992. Also MCC TR EID-414-91, 1991. 5R. Steele, S. Richardson, and M. Winchell, "DesignAdvisor: A knowledge-based integrated circuit design critic," [DesignAdvisor] IAAI-89, pp. 135-142, AAAI Press, 1989. Last modified: Tue Dec 18 18:14:30 PST 2001 ## About this archived copy His account of the Proteus project he led at MCC from 1984, last modified in December 2001. Source: [http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~petrie/proteus.html](http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~petrie/proteus.html), fetched raw over HTTP on 2026-09-14 and reproduced tag for tag (the original is HTML 2.0 era markup; only the character set and image paths were changed, and the colors were moved to a stylesheet). - 7 links were live when checked on 2026-09-14 and open the original address. - 5 links were dead (1990s and 2000s conference sites, mostly) and now open the [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/) at the original address, marked [archived]. - 1 links to his own picture and sibling pages open the copies hosted here. Other exhibits: [the professional bio](https://charlespetrie.com/classic/) · [his 1993 portal home page](https://charlespetrie.com/classic/home/). Back to [charlespetrie.com](https://charlespetrie.com/), the fan site, or read the [biography](https://charlespetrie.com/biography/) written from this page. An independent fan and tribute site celebrating the work of Charles Petrie. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or the official site of Dr. Petrie, Stanford University, the IEEE, or Burning Man Project. His own pages remain at www-cdr.stanford.edu/~petrie. More fan sites: [firth.com](https://firth.com/) [austen.com](https://austen.com/) [ryanholidayfans.com](https://ryanholidayfans.com/) [toscagruber.com](https://toscagruber.com/) --- An independent fan and tribute site celebrating the work of Charles Petrie. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or the official site of Dr. Petrie, Stanford University, the IEEE, or Burning Man Project. His own pages remain at www-cdr.stanford.edu/~petrie.