Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learn Prolog Now (2006)

lpn.swi-prolog.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 251 posts

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#91

Post by AlanYx »

jnpnj wrote: post #87
disambiguation wrote: post #40

I 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…

Can't find the links right now, but there were some papers on llm generating prolog facts and queries to ground the reasoning part. Somebody else might have them around.

There's a lot of work in this area. See e.g., the LoRP paper by Di et al. There's also a decent amount of work on the other side too, i.e., using LLMs to convert Prolog reasoning chains back into natural language.

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#92

Post by johnisgood »

mkirsten wrote: post #65
nuc1e0n wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think your brain isn't also brute forcing potential solutions subconciously and only surfacing the useful results?

Can you try calculating 101 * 70 in your head?

Very easy to solve, just like it is easy to solve many other ones once you know the tricks.

I recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Mental-Math-Mathemagicians-Ca...

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#93

Post by javcasas »

drannex wrote: post #44
travisgriggs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 can tell you, from the year 2045, that running the worlds global economy on Javascript was the direct link to the annihilation of most of our freedom and existence. Hope this helps.

Lucky you and your multiverse. In our multiverse we vibe coded the economy until the LLM decided we needed to construct more paperclips.

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#94

Post by jll29 »

ramses0 wrote: post #15
zemptime wrote: post #10

I've recently started modeling some of my domains/potential code designs in Prolog. I'm not that advanced. I don't really know Prolog that well. But even just using a couple basic prolog patterns to implement a working spec in the 'prolog way' is *unbelievably* useful for shipping really clean code designs to replace hoary old chestnut code. (prolog -> ruby)

I keep wishing for "regex for prolog", ie: being able to (in an arbitrary language) express some functional bits in "prolog-ish", and then be able to ask/query against it. let prologBlob = new ProLog() prologBlob.add( "a => b" ).add( "b => c" ) prologBlob.query( "a == c?" ) == True (not exactly that, but hopefully you get the gist) There's so much stuff regarding constraints, access control, relationship queries that…

What you mean is not "regex for Prolog" but an embedded PROLOG interpreter, which exists.

Ironically, the most common way I have seen people do this is use an embedded LISP interpreter, in which a small PROLOG is easily implemented.

https://www.metalevel.at/lisprolog/ suggests Lisprolog (Here are some embedded LISPs: ECL, PicoLisp, tulisp)

SWI-Prolog can also be linked against C/C++ code: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65118493/is-there-any-re... https://sourceforge.net/p/gprolog/code/ci/457f7b447c2b9e90a0...

Racklog is an embedded PROLOG for Racket (Scheme): https://docs.racket-lang.org/racklog/

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#95

Post by cpill »

jodrellblank wrote: post #54
disambiguation wrote: post #40

I 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!" You hard code some options, write a logical condition with placeholders, and Prolog brute-forces every option in every placeholder. It doesn't do reasoning . Arguably it lets a human express reasoning problems bet…

Of course it does "reasoning", what do you think reasoning is? From a quick google: "the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way". Prolog searches through a space of logical proposition (constraints) and finds conditions that lead to solutions (if one exists).

(a) Trying adding another 100 or 1000 interlocking proposition to your problem. It will find solutions or tell you one doesn't exist. (b) You can verify the solutions yourself. You don't get that with imperative descriptions of problems. (b) Good luck sandboxing Python or JavaScript with the treat of prompt injection still unsolved.

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#96

Post by polotics »

ang_cire wrote: post #71
mkirsten wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you try calculating 101 * 70 in your head?

Um, that's really easy to do in your head, there's no carrying or anything? 7,070 7 * 101 = 707 * 10 = 7,070 And computers don't brute-force multiplication either, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to the comment above?

I think it is very relevant, because no brute-forcing is involved in this solution.

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#97

Post by johnisgood »

jm4 wrote: post #75
hacker_homie wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been a while since I have done web dev, but web devs back then were certainly not scared of any language. Web devs are like the ultimate polyglots. Or at least they were. I was regularly bouncing around between a half dozen languages when I was doing pro web dev. It was web devs who popularized numerous different languages to begin with simply because delivering apps through a browser allowed us a wide variety o…

I have the complete opposite view of web developers. :)

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#98

Post by cpill »

disambiguation wrote: post #40

I 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…

YES! I've run a few experiments on classical logic problems and an LLM can spit out Prolog programs to solve the puzzel. Try it yourself, ask an LLM to write some prolog to solve some problem and then copy paste it to https://swish.swi-prolog.org/ and see if it runs.

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#99

Post by cpill »

ux266478 wrote: post #49
lmf4lol wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I entered university for my Bachelors, I was 28 years old and already worked for 5 or 6 years as a self-taught programmer in the industry. In the first semester, we had a Logic Programming class and it was solely taught in Prolog. At first, I was mega overwhelmed. It was so different than anything I did before and I had to unlearn a lot of things that I was used to in "regular" programming. At the end of the cla…

Did they teach you how to use DCGs? A few months ago I used EDCGs as part of a de-spaghettification and bug fixing effort to trawl a really nasty 10k loc sepples compilation unit and generate tags for different parts of it. Think ending up with a couple thousand ground terms like: tag(TypeOfTag, ParentFunction, Line). Type of tag indicating things like an unnecessary function call, unidiomatic conditional, etc. I the…

This sounds interesting. Perhaps you could write a blog post about it? I'm always looking for use cases for Prolog

Re: Learn Prolog Now (2006)

#100

Post by tejtm »

ramses0 wrote: post #15
zemptime wrote: post #10

I've recently started modeling some of my domains/potential code designs in Prolog. I'm not that advanced. I don't really know Prolog that well. But even just using a couple basic prolog patterns to implement a working spec in the 'prolog way' is *unbelievably* useful for shipping really clean code designs to replace hoary old chestnut code. (prolog -> ruby)

I keep wishing for "regex for prolog", ie: being able to (in an arbitrary language) express some functional bits in "prolog-ish", and then be able to ask/query against it. let prologBlob = new ProLog() prologBlob.add( "a => b" ).add( "b => c" ) prologBlob.query( "a == c?" ) == True (not exactly that, but hopefully you get the gist) There's so much stuff regarding constraints, access control, relationship queries that…

You could try picat

[0] https://picat-lang.org/

Post reply on HN