Improving system performance by adding the ability to remember

One means of quickly improving the performance of a system is to add a small amount of intelligence. Systems often already contain sufficient data such that by adding the ability to reason about this data a bit, the data becomes knowledge. The system can act on that knowledge and its performance can improve in a measurable manner, often dramatically. This incremental approach to software improvement mimics the evolution of biological organisms. In this paper we describe how we were able to improve the performance of a large-scale logistics analysis system by adding the ability to remember its previous computations, and to modify its behavior based on this recall.