Is production system matching interesting?

A panel session in which issues relating to the effects of advances in faster and more parallel hardware, production system match (PSM) algorithms, and application domains for match on PSM as a research area is presented. It is argued that there is no such thing as the optimal matching algorithm, even for the well-defined task of production-system match and that broadening the scope of the matching task beyond forward-chaining production system presents a new set of problems to the artificial intelligence community. Also, even with all the speedups, large production system runs take hours to complete, and a major portion of this time is attributable to PSM. Match technology remains a large and centralized component of system performance. To that extent, providing sufficient speedups in the match in these systems may still be useful. Performance issues of production system execution are discussed, and a common set of benchmarks and test cases is called for. It is argued that parallel algorithms for match, resolve, and fire are all interesting and difficult problems to solve, and should be the focus of research by the PSM community