Another thing I find from reading your last post is that precedence also matters.

Definitely. Precedence is a part of almost every system, regardless of whether it's AI related or not. Any time you have a system that has more than one valid possibility/choice/action available at once, you can do something to eliminate some choices or arrange them in a particular order.

If you have data with probabilities, you could sort them by probability from highest to lowest.

If you're performing graph traversal (pathfinding, planning, etc), your algorithm could focus on the least costly path(s) first (A* or similar classes of algorithms).

If you're choosing between valid parses of an ambiguous sentence in a natural language, you could assign each parse a probability based on how likely the chosen meaning of a term or grammar production is in regards to your current context/knowledge/discourse.