Doctor Charles L. Forgy is a computer scientist, known for developing the Rete algorithm used in his OPS5 and other production system languages used to build expert systems
Education
Doctor Forgy attended Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, and then advanced to Arlington State College (now University of Texas at Arlington, or UTA) graduating with a degree in Mathematics in 1972. As a student of Allen Newell, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1979 based on the Rete algorithm.
Career
From there he went to Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University) at Pittsburgh, a renowned center for study of Artificial intelligence. Rete
Even though Forgy did not work directly on the DEC XCON Artificial Intelligence problem of configuring computers for DEC in the late 70"s and early 80"s, the Rete algorithm was later incorporated into the system for more speed. The XCON used the early versions of Office of Personnel Services (Official Production System) that migrated to OPS2 and later OPS5.
DEC reported that XCON saved at least $1M United States dollar per year.
XCON, a project headed up by John McDermott and later shifted over to DEC programmers, was eventually composed of over 10K rules. The Rete (Latin for "network") algorithm allowed systems to run as much as 3,000 times faster in those days.
The original Rete algorithm was developed under a Department Of Defense grant and, as such, is public domain. Rete II and III
Doctor Forgy remained at Carnegie Mellon post-graduation and worked on further improvements to OPS5.
In 1983 he formed a company called Production Systems Technologies to develop and sell rule-based software, where he developed "Rete 2", a more efficient successor to Rete.
Rete 2 enabled rulebased programs to run between 50 and 100 times faster than the original Rete algorithm, depending on the complexity of the rules and objects. (The more complex, the faster the comparative results) Rete 2 is incorporated in CLIPS/R2, OPSJ and FICO"s Blaze Advisor. During that time, Forgy incorporated Rete 2 with Relational Logic Technology, which became named "Rete III".
The performance of Rete 2 and Rete III are virtually the same but Rete III has some extensions that allow it to work more efficiently with RLT but slows it down on benchmarks.
Rete-Northwest Territories
Doctor Forgy worked a next generation algorithm, called Rete-Northwest Territories, that has improved the execution speed by another order of magnitude. To this date Sparkling Logic SMARTS is the only BRMS product that uses this algorithm.
Present Times
In 2005, RulesPower was acquired by Fair Isaac Corporation, who obtained a license to integrate Rete III into Blaze Advisor, their own business rules product. Doctor Forgy retained the intellectual property rights to Rete 2 and his personal company, Production Systems Technology, still sells OPSJ and other systems that incorporate the Rete 2 algorithm.
KnowledgeBased Systems Corporation, an independent consulting company in Texas, maintains an extensive set of benchmarks for most BRMS and rulebased systems that demonstrate the effectiveness of the Rete and Rete 2 algorithms.
Doctor Forgy has often described Socialist Workers Party as a research-oriented company rather than a vendor of BRMS tools, but he does sell various rulebased tools via Socialist Workers Party. Doctor Forgy terminated his relationship with FICO in 2010 and joined Sparkling Logic as investor and strategic advisor. He has contributed his latest algorithm, RETE-Northwest Territories, to the Sparkling Logic SMARTS product.