131–140 of 251 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
Of course it doesn't "do reasoning", why do you think "following the instructions you gave it in the stupidest way imaginable" is 'obviously' reasoning? I think one definition of reasoning is being able to come up with any better-than-brute-force thing that you haven't been explicitly told to use on this problem. Prolog isn't "thinking". Not about anything, not about your problem, your code, its implementation, or an…
Python and Prolog are based upon completely different kinds of math. The only thing they share is that they are both Turing complete. But being Turing complete isn't a strong or complete mathematical definition of a programming language. This is especially true for Prolog which is very different from other languages, especially Python. You shouldn't even think of Prolog as a programming language, think of it as a type of logic system (or solver).
Prolog really is such a fantastic system, if I can justify its usage then I won't hesitate to do so. Most of the time I'll call a language that I find to be powerful a "power tool", but that doesn't apply here. Prolog is beyond a power tool. A one-off bit of experimental tech built by the greatest minds of a forgotten generation. You'd it find deep in irradiated ruins of a dead city, buried far underground in a bunke…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
Of course it doesn't "do reasoning", why do you think "following the instructions you gave it in the stupidest way imaginable" is 'obviously' reasoning? I think one definition of reasoning is being able to come up with any better-than-brute-force thing that you haven't been explicitly told to use on this problem. Prolog isn't "thinking". Not about anything, not about your problem, your code, its implementation, or an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also found it mindbending. But some parts, like e.g. the cut operator is something I've copied several times over for various things. A couple of prototype parser generators for example - allowing backtracking, but using a cut to indicate when backtracking is an error can be quite helpful.
"Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose." Elmore Leonard, on writing. But he might as well have been talking about the cut operator. At uni I had assignments where we were simply not allowed to use it.
Farts:
I'll never understand how it's a programming language not a graph database with query language. It's more MongoDb than Fortran.
is prolog a use-case language or is it as versatile as python?
Professionals write Prolog by focusing on the predicates and relations and leaving the execution flow to the interpreter. They also use the Constraint Logic Programming extensions (like clpfd) which use smart, external algorithms to solve problems instead of relying on Prolog's relatively "dumb" brute-force search, which is what typically leads to the "exploding brain" effect in complex code.
--- Worth mentioning here is that I wrote Prolog all on my own in 1979. On top of Nokolisp of course. There was no other functioning Prolog at that time I knew about.
Thereafter I have often planned "Infinity-Prolog" which can solve impossible problem with lazy evaluation.
I just learned from @grok that this Constraint Logic is basically what was aiming at.
I'll never understand how it's a programming language not a graph database with query language. It's more MongoDb than Fortran.
Because its more powerful than MongoDb or Fortran. The cut operator for instance gives it the ability to express things you just can't do in those other systems. The trade-off is that mastering the cut operator is a rare skill and only that one person who can do it can maintain the Prolog code. Compare that with MongoDb where even the village idiot can use it but with a huge performance cost.