What kind of problems is Prolog helping to solve besides GOFAI, theorem proving and computational linguistics?
See my comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45902960
Learn Prolog Now (2006)
51–60 of 251 posts
Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)
#52I am once again shilling the idea that someone should find a way to glue Prolog and LLMs together for better reasoning agents. https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43948657 Thesis: 1. LLMs are bad at counting the number of r's in strawberry. 2. LLMs are good at writing code that counts letters in a string. 3. LLMs are bad at solving reasoning problems. 4. Prolog is good at solving reasoning problems. 5. ??? 6. LLM…
Wouldn’t that be like a special case of neuro-symbolic programming?! There are plenty of research going on
Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)
#53I remember writing a Prolog(ish) interpreter in Common Lisp in an 90's AI course in grad school for Theorem proving (which is essentially what Prolog is doing under the hood). Really foundational to my understanding of how declarative programming works. In an ideal world I would still be programming in Lisp and using Prolog tools.
> In an ideal world… I see this sentiment a lot lately. A sense of missed nostalgia. What happened? In 20 years, will people reminisce about JavaScript frameworks and reminisce how this was an ideal world??
I also see the CL or Tcl+C or Assembly as an ideal world.
Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)
#54I am once again shilling the idea that someone should find a way to glue Prolog and LLMs together for better reasoning agents. https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43948657 Thesis: 1. LLMs are bad at counting the number of r's in strawberry. 2. LLMs are good at writing code that counts letters in a string. 3. LLMs are bad at solving reasoning problems. 4. Prolog is good at solving reasoning problems. 5. ??? 6. LLM…
> "4. Prolog is good at solving reasoning problems."
Plain Prolog's way of solving reasoning problems is effectively:
for person in [martha, brian, sarah, tyrone]:
if timmy.parent == person:
print "solved!"
Arguably it lets a human express reasoning problems better than other languages by letting you write high level code in a declarative way, instead of allocating memory and choosing data types and initializing linked lists and so on, so you can focus on the reasoning, but that is no benefit to an LLM which can output any language as easily as any other. And that might have been nice compared to Pascal in 1975, it's not so different to modern garbage collected high level scripting languages. Arguably Python or JavaScript will benefit an LLM most because there are so many training examples inside it, compared to almost any other langauge.
Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)
#55I am once again shilling the idea that someone should find a way to glue Prolog and LLMs together for better reasoning agents. https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43948657 Thesis: 1. LLMs are bad at counting the number of r's in strawberry. 2. LLMs are good at writing code that counts letters in a string. 3. LLMs are bad at solving reasoning problems. 4. Prolog is good at solving reasoning problems. 5. ??? 6. LLM…
As someone who did deep learning research 2017-2023, I agree. "Neurosymbolic AI" seems very obvious, but funding has just been getting tighter and more restrictive towards the direction of figuring out things that can be done with LLMs. It's like we collectively forgot that there's more than just txt2txt in the world.
Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)
#56Prolog is easily one of my favorite languages, and as many others in this thread, I first encountered it during university. I ended up teaching it for a couple of years (along with Haskell) and ever since, I've gone on an involuntary prolog bender of sorts once or twice a year. I almost always use it for Advent of code as well.
Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)
#57I am once again shilling the idea that someone should find a way to glue Prolog and LLMs together for better reasoning agents. https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43948657 Thesis: 1. LLMs are bad at counting the number of r's in strawberry. 2. LLMs are good at writing code that counts letters in a string. 3. LLMs are bad at solving reasoning problems. 4. Prolog is good at solving reasoning problems. 5. ??? 6. LLM…
You might find Eugene Asahara's detailed Prolog in the LLM Era series of about a dozen blog posts very useful - https://eugeneasahara.com/category/prolog-in-the-llm-era/
Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)
#58I really enjoyed learning Prolog in university, but it is a weird language. I think that 98% of tasks I would not want to use Prolog for, but for that remaining 2% of tasks it's extremely well suited for. I have always wished that I could easily call Prolog easily from other languages when it suited the use case, however good luck getting most companies to allow writing some code in Prolog.
Racket really shines in this regard: Racket makes it easy to build little DSLs, but they all play perfectly together because the underlying data model is the same. Example from the Racket home page: https://racket-lang.org/#any-syntax
You can have a module written in the `#racket` language (i.e., regular Racket) and then a separate module written in `#datalog` and the two can talk to each other!
Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)
#59I am once again shilling the idea that someone should find a way to glue Prolog and LLMs together for better reasoning agents. https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43948657 Thesis: 1. LLMs are bad at counting the number of r's in strawberry. 2. LLMs are good at writing code that counts letters in a string. 3. LLMs are bad at solving reasoning problems. 4. Prolog is good at solving reasoning problems. 5. ??? 6. LLM…
Prolog doesn't look like javascript or python so:
1. web devs are scared of it.
2. not enough training data?
I do remember having to wrestle to get prolog to do what I wanted but I haven't written any in ~10 years.
Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)
#60I remember writing a Prolog(ish) interpreter in Common Lisp in an 90's AI course in grad school for Theorem proving (which is essentially what Prolog is doing under the hood). Really foundational to my understanding of how declarative programming works. In an ideal world I would still be programming in Lisp and using Prolog tools.
> In an ideal world… I see this sentiment a lot lately. A sense of missed nostalgia. What happened? In 20 years, will people reminisce about JavaScript frameworks and reminisce how this was an ideal world??
Speaking as someone who just started exploring Prolog and lisp, and ended up in the frozen north isolated from internet - access. The tools were initially locked/commercial only during a critical period, and then everyone was oriented around GUIs - and GUI environments were very hostile to the historical tools, and thus provided a different kind of access barrier.
A side one is that the LISP ecology in the 80s was hostile to "working well with others" and wanted to have their entire ecosystem in their own image files. (which, btw, is one of the same reasons I'm wary of Rust cough)
Really, it's only become open once more with the rise of WASM, systemic efficiency of computers, and open source tools finally being pretty solid.