Thanks to the BRE survey participants

December 6, 2008

Many thanks to those readers who participated in the Microsoft BizTalk BRE survey that Charles Young pointed to in his blog.

In the future, I will endeavor to link to such surveys from this blog as well.

Charles mentioned in his post that he would liked to have seen a more “forward looking” survey, but hasn’t (as yet) followed up with any clarifications.

If you missed the survey, or have comments regarding it – I would love to hear from you.


October Rules Fest: Photos

November 17, 2008

Photos from the October Rules Fest 2008 are trickling onto Flickr.

I will update this post when more photos surface.


Parallel Rule Engines: What About Your Video Card?

November 15, 2008

While I’m on the subject of Dr. Charles Forgy’s talk at ORF 2008

Has anybody tried to compile CLIPS under CUDA?

We know from ORF that Dr. Forgy is working on a 4-core machine with his parallel version of OPS/J. I’m curious to see the same ideas applied to 32+ core video cards such as the CUDA architecture and the upcoming Larrabee.


Microsoft RoboChamps Competitions

November 14, 2008

Since I have already linked to my employer once today, I might as well post this too.

There is a series of challenges involving the programming of simulated robots at our RoboChamps site. Working with simulated robots should be familiar to those of us who have worked with RoboCup (or the simulated version) or TankSoar. The challenges include such tasks as navigating a maze, driving in an urban environment, sumo wrestling against another robot, and more. A soccer challenge looks to be coming soon under the name “Tournament”.

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October Rules Fest: Day 3

November 14, 2008

Some comments on the third day of the October Rules Fest:

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October Rules Fest: Day 2

November 12, 2008

Some comments on the second day of the October Rules Fest:

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Is there an updated Production Systems family tree?

November 5, 2008

Has anyone done an update to the productions system family tree on page 19 of the Klahr/Langely/Neches book Production System Models of Learning and Development? (You may be able to view page 19 using the Google Book Preview link on the MIT Press page.)

At this point, I have gathered data on some 50+ production system tools in an effort to create an updated diagram.

To be clear, this is not a duplicate of Rolando’s BRE Family Tree. I’m tackling a very specific area: OPS variants and progeny.

However, I don’t want to waste the effort if someone has done this work already. Perhaps someone in the academic community has already done this?


SOA Growth Projections Shrink

November 4, 2008

I won’t generally use this blog to point to articles, however a friend pointed this out to me today – and it has implications for rules deployments and a bunch of my friends who consult in the space. According to Infoworld, Gartner finds that SOA adoption appears to be slowing.

The key quote from InfoWorld is probably this:

“The two major reasons organizations choose for not pursuing SOA are lack of skills and expertise and no viable business case. There is confusion about constructing a business case for SOA, Gartner said.”

I’m sure the economy is a factor in this as well, but I’ll be watching carefully for the next set of projections.

The business case confusion is another aspect that I’ll probably be touching upon in my notes from ORF Day 3.


October Rules Fest: Day 1

November 4, 2008

Some comments on the first day of the October Rules Fest:

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October Rules Fest: Moving Forward

November 3, 2008

October Rules Fest sign

On October 22-24, I attended the (first?) October Rules Fest. I think something like this is long overdue. In fact, it is so overdue that I’m working to overcome my instinctive cynicism that the event will be unable to continue.

The community owes the organizers a round of thanks. Thank you: James, Rolando and Greg. It’s also my understanding that Mark Proctor helped get the ball rolling. Thanks, Mark.

Here are some of the reasons why I think the conference was/is valuable:
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