Charles Forgy

Dr Charles L. Forgy (born December 12, 1949 in Texas) is a computer scientist, known for developing the Rete algorithm used in his OPS5 and other production system languages used to build expert systems.

Dr. 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. From there he went to Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University) at Pittsburgh, a renowned center for study of Artificial intelligence. While studying at Carnegie he met his future wife, Diana, whom he married in 1977.

As a student of Allen Newell, he received his Ph.D. in 1979 based on the Rete algorithm. Even though Forgy did not work directly on the DEC XCON AI 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 OPS (Official Production System) that migrated to OPS2 and later OPS5.

DEC reported that XCON saved at least $1M USD 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 DOD grant and, as such, is public domain.

Dr 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.

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