On 12/12/2011 21:39, Maciej Gowin wrote:
I saw that there is an open issue for Opportunistic Backward
Chaining:
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBRULES-3272
While I want to start working on this topic during my PhD thesis
my question is if there is any work done on this?
Is there any possibility to contribute in solving this issue?
Of course I know that there is already Prolog Style Query Based
Backward Chaining implemented.
Come onto irc to discuss:
http://www.jboss.org/drools/irc
As a quick summary drools supports unification and derivation queries,
that work in the same way that you would expect from a prolog system.
However in Drools those derivation trees can be fully materialised, like
a materialized view in a database. What this means is that as the
underlying ground terms change, the result set is updated to reflect
that. So a query becomes a live view over a derivation tree.
This materilized tree almost gives us OBC, because each query + argument
is materized on first request. The problem though is currently this
derivation tree is unique to the caller. What we need to do is make any
derivaition tree, query + arguments, available as a global cache. So
when we go to execute a query, we first see if anyone else has, and if
so we just re-use those results. If it doesn't exist in the global cache
we execute the query, which results in it being cached. This same
caching mechanism of query + arguments is used to stop infinite
recursion, which is a problem solved by the "tabling algorithm".
I'm very close to a nieve implementation that effectively uses a hashmap
as an ondemand cache of query results. The tabling algorithm actually
recommends a tree instead, claiming better performance. I'll try and
abstract the use of a hashmap so research in alternative "caching"
algorithms can be tried out, to see which gives better performance.
Further work can look into a heurstic cache to evict unused
query+argument results. When a query+arguments derivation tree is no
longer used, we don't want to make it available for GC straight away,
instead we should use some eviction queue that keeps around often
requested query+argument derivation trees, but evicting older and not
used often ones for GC. The heuristics would allow tuning of memory
utilisation too, to stop the cache consuming all the memory.
I believe Davide has more he'd like to see built on this, for out of the
box abductive reasoning. Btw this is probably more of a thread for the
dev mailing list :)
Mark
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