Thanks guys for all the feedback. re Jim's comments: I completely agree that the difference b/t "slight" fever and "returning" fever, etc will pose some problems. My hunch is that initially I'll just do something like make "fever" be the only one for now w/ the obvious caveat that a few more diseases would not be eliminated than actually should be. Building on this, another challenging problem will be how to code the fact that when a symptom occurs early it usually means something else than if it returns later in the course of an illness. I'm not 100% sure how I'll handle this, but I think the first priority is getting access to a dataset and getting the bot up and running before I focus on this.
re Steve's comments: hmm, sounds like I really should take an AI class. This problem is just really exciting and driving me, and I'm glad you pointed out that this will probably take a lot more time than I had predicted. I'm pretty motivated personally to solve it. I had a few more questions about your code: a) Why did you choose not to use a dictionary to store the diseases (keys) and their possible values (symptoms)? That seemed the most intuitive to me, like, what I want to do is have it such that we enter in a few symptoms and then all the keys without those symptoms are automatically eliminated. I've been off and on teaching myself python for the last 6 months and have experience in Java. I mean, I think I want a structure like this: 1) Main class -this class calls the diagnose_disease class based on the set of entered symptoms and demographic information (ie age, location, season (winter, spring, fall, etc), patient history) 2) Diagnose_disease class -this is the heart of the project. Based on the entered symptoms, it keeps narrowing down the list of possible diseases. Ideally it would ask follow-up questions of the user to even further narrow down the list of possible diseases, but that's going to have to wait until I get the rest working. 3) Dictionary Class -this class contains a *dictionary??* of all possible diseases and their associated symptoms. Assuming in a standardized form for now (such that "slight_fever" and "returning_fever" are simply coded as "fever" for now, etc). does this seem like the best way to go about it? re: James. I completely agree that my first step should be getting access to a dataset. I need to know the format, etc of it before I really can progress on this.
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