Comment space is a bit limited to do an adequate explanation. For rules that have straightforward (but possibly compound) predicates, Rete will give you O(1) l

Comment space is a bit limited to do an adequate explanation. For rules that have straightforward (but possibly compound) predicates, Rete will give you O(1) lookup. From wikipedia: "In most cases, the speed increase over naïve implementations is several orders of magnitude (because Rete performance is theoretically independent of the number of rules in the system)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm My favorite reference on the subject is at the bottom of the wikipedia page: "Production Matching for Large Learning Systems - R Doorenbos" Sadly (and strangely) many of the "Rete Engines" today do it wrong and will not give you effecient lookups.