If you have been involved at all in the Business Rules industry, How could you not know Dr Charles Forgy?
His break-through was the RETE algorithm that has fueled the BRMS industry. Granted, some smaller business rules products don’t use RETE but the vast majority of the market does.
We love him for that! What a smart piece of algorithm!
He has dedicated his life and passion since then to perfecting the execution of business rules with continuous improvements on performance. Well, his professional life that is. I had the chance to meet his loving family too but that is out of the topic of this post.
When he came up with RETE III, I had the chance to participate in the Rules Power acquisition and contribute (from a vision perspective) in its integration with the product I was responsible for back then — Blaze Advisor.
Time has passed since then but not his passion obviously. With creativity and perseverance, he came up once again with a new generation of his algorithm called RETE-NT. As far as I know, he has figured out a way to blow again the performance limits (http://bit.ly/bBVEtu) we were facing in inference mode.
How did he do it? Well, he would not say of course… Trade secret… But it is definitely another major achievement for us all.
Thank you Charles for what your work and passion!
I thought about another cute name for algorithm but as I discovered at my local home improvement store it was already registered!
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