Ripple-down rules

Alright kiddo, have you ever played a game where you had to follow certain rules to win? Well, that's kind of what ripple-down rules are.

Imagine you're playing a game of chess and your friend tells you that whenever the queen is in danger, you should move it to safety. They also tell you that the knight can jump over other pieces, but the bishop can only move diagonally. These are rules that you learn as you play the game, and they help you make smarter moves.

Now, imagine you're a computer trying to learn how to play chess. You don't know anything about the rules of the game, but you want to be able to make smart moves like a human player. This is where ripple-down rules come in.

Ripple-down rules are created by taking a big set of data (like a bunch of chess games) and using a computer algorithm to find patterns in the data. The computer looks at all the moves that the human players made and the outcomes of those moves (did they win or lose?) and tries to figure out what rules the players were following to make those moves.

For example, the computer might notice that whenever a player moves their queen to a certain spot, they tend to win more often. The computer would then create a rule that says "if the queen is in danger, move it to this spot." This is called a ripple-down rule because it "ripples down" from the big set of data to the individual rule.

Once these rules are created, the computer can use them to make its own moves in the game. By following these rules, the computer can make smarter moves and hopefully win more often.

So there you have it, ripple-down rules are like a set of rules that a computer learns by looking at a bunch of data, just like how you learn the rules of a game by playing it. Simple, right?