Seeker of logic programmers!
Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
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Re: Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
#2I think Prolog and logic programming will have a second renaissance. I think at the very least a general artificial intelligence would require a logical inference engine similar to Prolog.
Re: Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
#3I think Prolog and logic programming will have a second renaissance. I think at the very least a general artificial intelligence would require a logical inference engine similar to Prolog.
Do any of the non-artificial intelligences walking around out there contain a logical inference engine similar to Prolog?
Re: Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
#4I think Prolog and logic programming will have a second renaissance. I think at the very least a general artificial intelligence would require a logical inference engine similar to Prolog.
Do any of the non-artificial intelligences walking around out there contain a logical inference engine similar to Prolog?
Re: Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
#5I think Prolog and logic programming will have a second renaissance. I think at the very least a general artificial intelligence would require a logical inference engine similar to Prolog.
Do any of the non-artificial intelligences walking around out there contain a logical inference engine similar to Prolog?
> non-artificial intelligences walking around out there
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean people? I don't think our 'inference engine' is much like Prolog, no.
Re: Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
#6I think Prolog and logic programming will have a second renaissance. I think at the very least a general artificial intelligence would require a logical inference engine similar to Prolog.
I think it's actually the complete opposite. The current biomimetism direction being privileged by the modern A.I. trends is most likely the correct way to achieve "True" A.I.
However, Inference-based A.I. is actually needed to properly tackle many of the business problems that are being thrown at ML systems today. Explainability and bias reduction can probably only be be taken so far with the current approaches, and I suspect that this "so far" is not far enough for many tasks. It's definitely the case from a practical standpoint today.
So inference-based A.I. is due for a comeback indeed, but I'd say AGI is looking like one of the main areas where the current techniques might work.
Re: Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
#7There was a minor hype cycle with SMT solvers in 2019.
For a while I was extremely fascinated by SAT as an encoding for hard problems that somehow had heuristic fast solvers; particularly by SATPLAN, the blocks world, etc.
But there's an useful contrast with Lisp, the other thing everyone within a radius of HN would like to emerge as winner. Lisp is essentially a syntax concept. It isn't particularly opinionated about problems -- on the opposite, it's indefinitely extensible to accomodate nearly everything. So we have Clojure and Hy (a Lisp that superficially imitates Clojure but compiles to the Python AST) and people doing scikit-learn ML on Lisp.
Logic programming, on the other hand, wants problems to be formulated on its terms. It needs the world itself to change to "win big". Of course logic programming problems aren't going to disappear, as sparse linear algebra programs won't. But this isn't a paradigm, it's an application.
Re: Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do any of the non-artificial intelligences walking around out there contain a logical inference engine similar to Prolog?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datomic
Datomic is cool but not an intelligence, artificial or not. The GP was trying to point out that having a prolog-style inference engine is not required for intelligence and pointing to humans as a counterexample to prove why not.
Re: Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
#9I did some work with SWI-Prolog. It is useful when the problem can be effectively translated into Prolog's preferred form of terms and rules. But the solver mechanism only solves a subset of logical inference needs. Prolog's use of logic in AI should not be conflated with the AI/ML systems which use networks of floating point operations, i.e. not boolean operations.
As always, best to choose the tool / language that best suits the problem.
Re: Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?
#10I have used Prolog in a few professional projects.
I think if they came out with a version in hardware like they use to have lisp machines, it would have much better performance.