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.


Opening Moves

December 6, 2008

[Very busy at work right now, so posts will taper off until I get to the holiday at the end of the month. That said, I do have some 20+ posts drafted. Rest assured, more content is on the way.]

Being a member of the IEEE, I regularly browse the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum. The most recent issue (December 2008) includes an article entitled “Bots Get Smart” by Jonathan Schaeffer, Vadim Bulitko, and Michael Buro. The main topic of the article is the improving of game AI in order to provide better experiences for players.

One of the parts that stood out to me was this paragraph:

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October Rules Fest: Providing Feedback

November 17, 2008

I may be in the minority, but I would prefer something a little more structured than the October Rules Fest 2008 call for suggestions.

If I was authoring a feedback form for the conference, I would solicit feedback for a number of key areas. I will outline some of those areas below. This is obviously not a finished feedback form. Some of these are free-form-answer questions and some should be multiple choice. That said, if you attended and are planning to provide feedback to the organizers, consider addressing some of these areas in your comments.

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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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Microsoft Solver Foundation

November 14, 2008

In general, I will endeavor to minimize blogrolling and marketing in this blog. That said, those of us in the rules space often have interests in areas such as constraint programming and linear programming.

To those folks, I would like to point out the new Microsoft Solver Foundation. My eye was especially caught by the use of DSLs, and the ability to plug in third-party solvers.


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?