JESS

Jess, the Java Expert System Shell

New! Jess version 3.2 is here! Jess 3.2 fixes bugs in version 3.1 (including a Windows '95 compilation problem and bugs in several multifield functions) and includes, for the first time, a comprehensive manual.

See the Jess Manual for more information about new Jess features.

[Rated Top 5% WebApplet by JARS]
[Gamelan's Best] Jess is a clone of the core of the CLIPS expert system shell. Jess was written entirely in Sun's Java language by Ernest Friedman-Hill at Sandia National Laboratories is Livermore, CA.

Here Jess is solving "Monkey and Bananas", a classic AI planning exercise. A monkey in a room full of chests, keys, and ladders, along with some hidden fruit, is trying to satisfy her hunger, equipped only with a set of heuristics for manipulating objects. Push a button to find your favorite fruit. The flashing lights correspond to events within the system: rules firing, facts being asserted, etc.


Jess would appear here if you had a Java-aware browser.

Jess is downward compatible with CLIPS, in that every valid Jess script is a valid CLIPS script. Like CLIPS, Jess uses the Rete algorithm to process rules, a very efficient mechanism for solving the difficult many-to-many matching problem (see for example "Rete: A Fast Algorithm for the Many Pattern/ Many Object Pattern Match Problem", Charles L. Forgy, Artificial Intelligence 19(1982), 17-37.)

Jess contains only the essential features of CLIPS, and leaves out a lot, including COOL, the CLIPS Object Oriented Language extension; but it is a powerful, fast, and efficient tool with many applications.

Jess can be downloaded here. Jess is available for download in PKZip and in tar/gzip formats.

Jess is featured in the Book "Intelligent Java Applications for the Internet and Intranets" by Mark Watson.

For more info about Jess, contact ejfried@ca.sandia.gov. For Jess licensing info, contact C.V. "Subra" Subramanian.
You can learn more about CLIPS from Intelligent Software Professionals or IntelliNet.

The CLIPS source for the Monkey and Bananas problem.

Last modified: Mon Dec 1 16:33:18 1997