Adventure In Prolog

Not long ago" Dennis Merritt wrote one of the best books that I know of about implementing expert systems in Prolog, and I was very glad he published it in our series. The only problem is there are still some unfortunate people around who do not know Prolog and are not sufficiently prepared either to read Merritt's book, or to use this extremely productive language, be it for knowledge-based work or even for everyday programming. Possibly this last statement may surprise you if you were under the impression that Prolog was an "artificial intelligence language" with very limited application potential. Please believe this editor's statement that quite the opposite is true: for at least four years, I have been using Prolog for every programming task in which I am given the option of choosing the language. Therefore, I 'am indeed happy that Dennis Merritt has written another good book on my language of choice, and that it meets the high standard he set with his prior book, Building Expert Systems in Prolog. All that remains for me to do is to wish you success and enjoyment when taking off on your Adventure in Prolog.

Appropriate for courses in artificial intelligence, computer science, logic programming, and expert systems. Can be used as supplemental text in courses in computational linguistics (natural language processing). This text covers the Prolog programming language thoroughly with an emphasis on building practical application software, not just theory. Working through this book, students build several types of expert systems, as well as natural language processing software and utilities to read foreign file formats. This is the first book to cover ISO Standard Prolog, but the programs are compatible with earlier dialects of the language. Program files are available by FTP from The University of Georgia.

This book is for people who have done some programming, either in Prolog or in a language other than Prolog, and who can find their way around a reference manual. The emphasis of this book is on a simplified and disciplined methodology for discerning the mathematical structures related to a problem, and then turning these structures into Prolog programs. This book is therefore not concerned about the particular features of the language nor about Prolog programming skills or techniques in general. A relatively pure subset of Prolog is used, which includes the 'cut', but no input/output, no assert/retract, no syntactic extensions such as if then-else and grammar rules, and hardly any built-in predicates apart from arithmetic operations. I trust that practitioners of Prolog program ming who have a particular interest in the finer details of syntactic style and language features will understand my purposes in not discussing these matters. The presentation, which I believe is novel for a Prolog programming text, is in terms of an outline of basic concepts interleaved with worksheets. The idea is that worksheets are rather like musical exercises. Carefully graduated in scope, each worksheet introduces only a limited number of new ideas, and gives some guidance for practising them. The principles introduced in the worksheets are then applied to extended examples in the form of case studies.

Prolog is a programming language, but a rather unusual one. Prolog'' is short for Programming with Logic'', and the link with logic gives Prolog its special character. At the heart of Prolog lies a surprising idea: don't tell the computer what to do. Instead, describe situations of interest, and compute by asking questions. Prolog will logically deduce new facts about the situations and give its deductions back to us as answers. Why learn Prolog? For a start, its say what the problem is, rather than how to solve it'' stance, means that it is a very high level language, good for knowledge rich applications such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and the semantic web. So by studying Prolog, you gain insight into how sophisticated tasks can be handled computationally. Moreover, Prolog requires a different mindset. You have to learn to see problems from a new perspective, declaratively rather than procedurally. Acquiring this mindset, and learning to appreciate the links between logic and programming, makes the study of Prolog both challenging and rewarding. Learn Prolog Now! is a practical introduction to this fascinating language. Freely available as a web-book since 2002 (see www.learnprolognow.org) Learn Prolog Now! has became one of the most popular introductions to the Prolog programming language, an introduction prized for its clarity and down-to-earth approach. It is widely used as a textbook at university departments around the world, and even more widely used for self study. College Publications is proud to present here the first hard-copy version of this online classic. Carefully revised in the light of reader's feedback, and now with answers to all the exercises, here you will find the essential material required to help you learn Prolog now.

Written for those who wish to learn Prolog as a powerful software development tool, but do not necessarily have any background in logic or AI. Includes a full glossary of the technical terms and self-assessment exercises.

This new edition of The Art of Prolog contains a number of important changes. Most background sections at the end of each chapter have been updated to take account of important recent research results, the references have been greatly expanded, and more advanced exercises have been added which have been used successfully in teaching the course. Part II, The Prolog Language, has been modified to be compatible with the new Prolog standard, and the chapter on program development has been significantly altered: the predicates defined have been moved to more appropriate chapters, the section on efficiency has been moved to the considerably expanded chapter on cuts and negation, and a new section has been added on stepwise enhancement—a systematic way of constructing Prolog programs developed by Leon Sterling. All but one of the chapters in Part III, Advanced Prolog Programming Techniques, have been substantially changed, with some major rearrangements. A new chapter on interpreters describes a rule language and interpreter for expert systems, which better illustrates how Prolog should be used to construct expert systems. The chapter on program transformation is completely new and the chapter on logic grammars adds new material for recognizing simple languages, showing how grammars apply to more computer science examples.

An introduction to Prolog programming for artificial intelligence covering both basic and advanced AI material. A unique advantage to this work is the combination of AI, Prolog and Logic. Each technique is accompanied by a program implementing it. Seeks to simplify the basic concepts of logic programming. Contains exercises and authentic examples to help facilitate the understanding of difficult concepts.