Go on Graeme Newlands

Building a Rete algorithm based Rule Engine in Golang

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:48:00 -0700

Disclaimer: Generated by Me!

Introduction

The motivation of this personal initiative was this post from Anthropic: Building a C Compiler. Nicholas Carlini of Anthropic wrote this post before we saw even more significant initiatives such as solving Navier-Stokes and the OpenAI breakout. To me, this was the first example of using swarms of agents to complete a task, rather than single process model SDLCs, and also a task I’d imagined would not be one independently achievable by AI.

Building OPS5 in Go: Implementing the Rete Algorithm from Scratch

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Disclaimer: Generated by AI, Gemini 3.8 through Antigravity

Work in Progress: This post is an evolving engineering log and retrospective on designing and implementing a pure Go OPS5 production rule engine from the ground up.

The Genesis: Why OPS5 and Why Go?

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Charles Forgy at Carnegie Mellon University developed OPS5 (Official Production System 5) alongside the Rete algorithm. It became the intellectual cornerstone of expert systems, forward-chaining rule engines, and declarative knowledge representation.

Conway's Game of Life in OPS5: Declarative Cellular Automata in WebAssembly

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Disclaimer: Generated by AI, Gemini 3.8 through Antigravity

Cellular automata like John Conway’s Game of Life are almost universally taught and implemented imperatively: allocate a two-dimensional grid array, iterate over every row and column with nested for loops, count the 8 Moore neighbors, and write the next state to a backbuffer.

Following my recent work building ops5 in Go (and the deep dive in Building OPS5 in Go: Implementing the Rete Algorithm from Scratch), I wanted to put the engine through its paces with something visually tangible, reactive, and non-trivial: