Thomas Cooper is the keynote speaker for the conference. He wrote the original book on OPS5 way back when and has continued to work in the field since.

Some of his speech was some kind of review of what he live from an evolution perspective.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s he worked at Digital (DEC) and they were working on first generation knowledge systems (R1, OPS4, OPS5). He worked on XSEL which was basically an interface for sales people to select functionality instead of part numbers to build Vax Systems.

When they started to try building teams, they realized the best rule writers were not programmers. They needed people that could handle complexity and hired people other than programmers. Programmers had a tendency to write very cumbersome code.

They also worked on developing a Monopoly game that was built in OPS5 including random phrases that would show “personality” and they attached it to a speech synthesizer and gave them different voices. Very cool stuff for that era if you think about it.

He then went on to challenges of building very large expert systems that keep evolving with large number of rules. The maintenance became a problem. New people would get 3 months of training and then 9 months of contributing. There was a 40-50% rule change rate per year. The number of parts the system needed to handle, number of rules all variables that started making this become a maintenance and a performance nightmare.

They started working on technology improvements, worked on standards and conventions (rules, rule groups, rule naming, formatting, etc.). They had to be careful to to start rebuilding a procedural language. All of the things we assume will be present in today’s systems were just not there back then and they had to build all of the functionality themselves.

Here are some of the things they were telling new people to learn to work on their systems:

• Think in terms of rules and state
• Strive for rule independence
• user refraction
• use general and special case rules
• Etc.

Today, he was hoping that the rule technology would have evolved. It has but not as much as he was hoping for. Design Patterns are lacking in the industry. Temporal models are not as evolved as he would like (CEP and Effective Dated Domain Models).

Very interesting keynote that kind of gives us a glimpse of how things were when the pioneers in the industry started.