This blog post could really use links to other sources.

First of all, I had no idea what an E-graph was, so I had to search for that myself.

Then the post presents the problem itself, without explaining a practical situation in which you’d need to compute/solve this. Would this be used by a compiler to come up with an optional execution strategy? Or an interpreter to evaluate terms?

It talks about the use of a cost function, but to me it’s not clear where it comes from, and what the cost represents. Would that be CPU cycles? Memory use?

I decide to do a Google search for “E-graph extraction problem”, but apart from the blog post itself, I get no meaningful results. I feel lost.