January 7, 2010
Most readers should be familiar with George Santayana‘s quote about remembering the past (also called Santayana’s Law of Repetitive Consequences).
The rise of the BRMS over the last few years has brought lots of enthusiastic new members to our little rules world. These people are eager to contribute to the field and make their own mark. It is the job of the “old guard” to make sure the newcomers are properly aware of the prior research in our field. (Having only participated in the space since 1995, I consider myself to still be a newcomer.) For example, the rise of the multi-core processor means that tons of older research in parallel rule engines is of interest and relevant. For another example, the classic work on conflict resolution strategies doesn’t appear to be online and is in a long out-of-print 30-year-old book. (And at least the prices for “Pattern-Directed Inference Systems” are somewhat affordable – as of this writing, “Human Problem Solving” starts at $190 and goes up to $800 on Amazon.) A third example is that the Wikipedia article on the Rete algorithm only has references to papers that are not online for one reason or another. (I personally haven’t even seen the “A network match routine for production systems.” working paper.)
Thus, I would like to highlight a few useful resources:
We need to work together as a group to improve the online availability of our history.
No Comments » | 
AI, rules | Tagged: AI, archaeology, backward chaining, Forgy, forward chaining, multicore, parallel, parallelism, rule engine, rules | 
Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
January 7, 2010
I just spotted another .NET implementation of Rete – NRuler. The site shows only 10 downloads, but it seems to have been live less than a month so far. Any of the 10 downloaders care to share their impressions? How does it compare with NxBRE or SRE?
(As an aside, I spotted NRuler because it is linked in the “See also” section of the Wikipedia article on Rete. At best, the link to NRuler should be an “External link” rather than a “See also” – and probably not even that. As an industry, we need to stop spamming this article with promotional product-specific links. Yes, I know that NRuler isn’t a commercial product, but I don’t see any reason for it to be linked there over any other piece of software.)
No Comments » | .NET, AI, rules | Tagged: .NET, AI, Microsoft, NRuler, NxBRE, rete, rule engine, rules, Simple Rule Engine, SRE | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
January 6, 2010
I recently stumbled across another rule engine for .NET that I hadn’t seen before: Simple Rule Engine (SRE).
Looks dormant, or possibly dead altogether. If any readers have tried it out, I welcome comments about your experiences with it.
No Comments » | .NET, AI, rules | Tagged: .NET, AI, Microsoft, rete, rule engine, rules, Simple Rule Engine, SRE | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
November 19, 2009
The results of the Mario Bros. AI competition have been made available. (Not really surprising that the top three entries used A*.)
Robin Baumgarten has won, and has made his source code available. AIGameDev.com also has an interview with Robin.
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: A*, AI, games, machine learning, Mario, Nintendo, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
November 6, 2009
The latest Wired magazine has an interesting article on Demand Media. If you’ve ever used sites such as eHow then you may have encountered Demand Media without even realizing it.
Demand Media generates web content – a lot of it. It appears that they have an algorithm that analyzes popular web search terms, advertisement rates and their competition – and spits out ideas for content. The example output shown in the article is “how to make butterflies for cake decorating”. That’s after two proof readers have munged the set of terms from the original output into a sentence. (I don’t know if this example is contrived or real, but it does lead to a real article.)
Once they have a topic, they use freelancers to create articles and/or video tutorials. They pay as much as $20 per clip to the filmmakers, whereas the title proofers get 8 cents per headline.
These folks are pumping out enormous amounts of content. The article says that by next summer they will be publishing 1 million items a month. They already have 170,000 videos on YouTube.
Anyway, the article is an interesting read. I’ll close with a quote:
“We’re not talking about $1,000 videos, so a couple dollars here or there can make a serious difference. For instance, pay an extra dollar for fact-checking.”
No Comments » | datamining | Tagged: algorithms, datamining, Demand Media, eHow, Wired magazine, YouTube | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
October 12, 2009
Certainly, if you’ve been around the rule space long enough, you will be familiar with such terms as “knowledge engineering” and “knowledge capture”.
Robert X. Cringely’s latest column is (somewhat) about a knowledge capture platform. Nestled in among the usual rant about IBM and outsourcing (and I say that as a fan), is a link to an IBM patent for a “Platform for Capturing Knowledge”.
I haven’t read the patent myself, only Cringely’s commentary. But it seems the end result is not an expert system, but a video game for training experts. That’s an interesting aspect, although I’m not sure what the patent has that is unique. I seem to recall seeing plenty of prior art in this area years ago, especially in terms of expert systems for training medical personnel.
I don’t have time to spend digging up prior art right now, but I bet a number of readers have seen some as well.
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: expert systems, games, knowledge engineering, Robert X. Cringely, This Is Your Brain On Videogames, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
October 8, 2009
If you still haven’t read Adam Jacob’s paper “The Pathologies of Big Data” that I linked to previously, go read it.
Also interesting, Dare Obasanjo’s recent post on denormalization in which he makes some similar arguments, complete with examples.
I also had not heard before of the supposed “NoSQL Movement“, that Dare mentions. Very interesting.
No Comments » | datamining | Tagged: big data, databases, datamining, NoSQL | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
October 8, 2009
I note with some interest the recent release of some of the lunar module code in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
This is related to the Virtual AGC project, which is an effort to build an emulator for the Apollo Guidance Computer.
I’m fascinated by the constraints placed on computing resources in outer space environments, so I find this all quite interesting.
I’ll also take the opportunity to plug James Tomayko‘s book “Computers In Space: Journeys With NASA” – the content should be obvious from the title. I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Tomayko speak on this topic when he was on the ACM lecture circuit in the early 1990s and found his talk fascinating.
No Comments » | Dead Media | Tagged: Apollo, Apollo Guidance Computer, archaeology, James Tomayko, NASA | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
