There actually isn't a lot of prerequisite knowledge before you can learn Rete, just general knowledge of graphs I think. I did spend a lot of time trying to u

There actually isn't a lot of prerequisite knowledge before you can learn Rete, just general knowledge of graphs I think. I did spend a lot of time trying to understand how it all works with pen and paper, reading the original Rete description and the wikipedia article, it's a bit annoying because it seems descriptions of Rete are very few AND they use different terminology and approaches to explaining, AND there are really a lot of implementation choices to make depending on the specifics of your problem, so I had a lot of difficulty wrapping my head completely around the concept. In fact, the first implementation I made was very contrived and I unknowingly bypassed a lot of problems and I didn't even know my understanding was still incomplete. It's only when I tried to make another implementation for a more difficult problem that I realized and fixed my lackings. Now that I really understand it though, it really doesn't sound that complicated to me anymore, it's pretty "simple and intuitive". If I didn't remember all the pain I had to go through to understand it, I might think that it's in fact a pretty simple algorithm. I think the way too abstract and obtuse descriptions of it are to blame for much of the difficulty because there really isn't a lot to the fundamentals of the algorithm (though the explosion of implementation choices can get messy to sort through). I guess about now would be a great time for me to start a blog. ;)