Business Rules Forum Benchmarks

Greetings, Programs:

A few things happened during the Q&A part of the BR Forum 2006 presentation on benchmarks. About six minutes into the Q&A part Dr. Forgy said something like this: "I was looking for parallelism in a [inaudible] graphic poblem but I discovered that it had extremely high system demands. For example, I have a parallel application at my office so that I could tell if it is in parallel ... [inaudbile] and it runs Waltz in about a half a second in the serial implementation. When I turn on parallelism, it goes to about 3/4 second." ... "So I've kind of [inaudible] considered [inaudible] Waltz 50 [inaudible] at this point. But there are problems that automatically does [inaudible] where we're going to thave to go to paralleism."

Now, three things to consider: (1) Dr. Forgy is running a rulebase (OPSJ?) in serial mode. (2) Dr. Forgy is running a rulebase(OPSJ?) in parallel mode. (3) either mode of the rulebase runs Waltz 50 is less than a second. One other thing from the conference that is of note from Dr. Forgy was, "There is no known way to solve an NP Complete problem in less than exponential time." Meaning, that there are problems for which ordinary rulebase will not be practical but it will require a parallelized rulebase. Things like Homeland Defense, where there will be hundreds of changes between matches on thousands (or millions) of rules. This will require not only an extremely fast engine but also some sophisticated rule engineering, not the "just throw them in the bucket" kind of business applications that most vendors are doing today in most commercial applications.

One other thing that he noted, "Waltz and Manners are THE benchmarks that are out there. We've looked and looked and looked for others." "There aren't any other benchmarks out there." Well, hopefully, beginning with 2007 we can change that. Personally, Yaakov speaking here, I'm looking forward to doing more than just business applications but we have to realize that it's the business and government applications that pay the bill.

SDG
Yaakov
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