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Confessions of a production rule vendor (part 1)

If you are using one of the more popular rules engines, chances are you can blame me.  I popularized the technology of forward-chaining production rules based on the Rete Algorithm.  Others have certainly contributed; my path is the one that led to open-source implementations and many commercial products, including those of IBM, Oracle, SAP, TIBCO, Red Hat, and too many others to mention (e.g., see this).

Today, I want to make clear that the future prospects for production rule technology are diminishing.  My objective here is to explain why most rule-based technologies are no good and why some are much better.  Although production rule technology is much better than most rule-based technologies, I hope to also make clear that in the age of IBM’s Watson, Google’s Brain, and the semantic web, production rule technology is inadequate.

They are not created equal.

Rules have become so pervasive in the software business that vendors of all types of software say they have them.  Consider, for example, that even Microsoft Outlook has rules!

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Answers to Common Questions About AI

Well this is a blast from the past… I was working on “the next post” about how Watson, Google, and the semantic web threaten the major BRMS systems when I found myself rewriting that what matters about Rete Algorithm-based production rule systems is that the order of the rules does not matter.  It occurred to me that I must have written that a dozen times or more in my career so I did a Google and found this old paper has been on-line at the Free Library On-Line since 2006!  I recall writing this in the early nineties and the owner of an AI magazine telling me he carried it with him for the better part of a year  (and printing it in his magazine, I think).   Some of you may enjoy reading it again!

Best,
Paul

1. WHAT IS AN EXPERT SYSTEM?

An expert system is a program that includes expertise.

2. WHAT IS EXPERTISE?

Expertise is knowledge that enables an individual, group or program to perform an intellectual task better than that task can be performed without the expertise.

3. HOW IS EXPERTISE ENCODED WITHIN A PROGRAM?

Expertise, being knowledge, falls into a few general categories.

Some knowledge is declarative knowledge which doesn’t do anything but which represents truth or state. Such knowledge can be stored in a standard database.

Some knowledge is algorithmic and can therefore be flow charted. Such knowledge can be expressed as a routine in any procedural programming language. Not everything a person or organization knows can be easily translated into data structures and flow charts, however.

4. SO FLOW-CHARTABLE ALGORITHMS SHOULD BE CODED PROCEDURALLY?

Yes, if the flow chart is actually produced, if it is not extraordinarily complex, and if there is no reason to believe that the flow chart is incorrect or incomplete. After all, procedural languages and flow charts are isomorphic, anything that can be expressed in one can be expressed using the other. However, if it is hard to produce a flow chart, it will be even more difficult to produce a working program using a procedural language.

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IBM Ilog JRules for business modeling and rule authoring

If you are considering the use of any of the following business rules management systems (BRMS):

  • IBM Ilog JRules
  • Red Hat JBoss Rules
  • Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor
  • Oracle Policy Automation (i.e., Haley in Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc.)
  • Oracle Business Rules (i.e., a derivative of JESS in Fusion)

you can learn a lot by carefully examining this video on decisions using scoring in Ilog.  (The video is also worth considering with respect to Corticon since it authors and renders conditions, actions, and if-then rules within a table format.)

This article is a detailed walk through that stands completely independently of the video (I recommend skipping the first 50 seconds and watching for 3 minutes or so).  You will find detailed commentary and insights here, sometimes fairly critical but in places complimentary.  JRules is a mature and successful product.  (This is not to say to a CIO that it is an appropriate or low risk alternative, however. I would hold on that assessment pending an understanding of strategy.)

The video starts by creating a decision table using this dialog:

Note that the decision reached by the resulting table is labeled but not defined, nor is the information needed to consult the table specified.  As it turns out, this table will take an action rather than make a decision.  As we will see it will “set the score of result to a number”. As we will also see, it references an application.  Given an application, it follows references to related concepts, such as borrowers (which it errantly considers synonomous with applicants), concerning which it further pursues employment information.

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