Logic Programming

This book gives an account oC the mathematical Coundations oC logic programming. I have attempted to make the book selC-contained by including prooCs of almost all the results needed. The only prerequisites are some Camiliarity with a logic programming language, such as PROLOG, and a certain mathematical maturity. For example, the reader should be Camiliar with induction arguments and be comCortable manipulating logical expressions. Also the last chapter assumes some acquaintance with the elementary aspects of metric spaces, especially properties oC continuous mappings and compact spaces. Chapter 1 presents the declarative aspects of logic programming. This chapter contains the basic material Crom first order logic and fixpoint theory which will be required. The main concepts discussed here are those oC a logic program, model, correct answer substitution and fixpoint. Also the unification algorithm is discussed in some detail. Chapter 2 is concerned with the procedural semantics oC logic programs. The declarative concepts are implemented by means oC a specialized Corm oC resolution, called SLD-resolution. The main results of this chapter concern the soundness and completeness oC SLD-resolution and the independence oC the computation rule. We also discuss the implications of omitting the occur check from PROLOG implementations. Chapter 3 discusses negation. Current PROLOG systems implement a form of negation by means of the negation as failure rule. The main results of this chapter are the soundness and completeness oC the negation as failure rule.

The topic of logic programming and databases. has gained in creasing interest in recent years. Several events have marked the rapid evolution of this field: the selection, by the Japanese Fifth Generation Project, of Prolog and of the relational data model as the basis for the development of new machine archi tectures; the focusing of research in database theory on logic queries and on recursive query processing; and the pragmatic, application-oriented development of expert database systems and of knowledge-base systems. As a result, an enormous amount of work has been produced in the recent literature, coupled with the spontaneous growth of several advanced projects in this area. The goal of this book is to present a systematic overview of a rapidly evolving discipline, which is presently not described with the same approach in other books. We intend to introduce stu dents and researchers to this new discipline; thus we use a plain, tutorial style, and complement the description of algorithms with examples and exercises. We attempt to achieve a balance be tween theoretical foundations and technological issues; thus we present a careful introduction to the new language Datalog, but we also focus on the efficient interfacing of logic programming formalisms (such as Prolog and Datalog) with large databases.

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.

Covering the authors' own state-of-the-art research results, this book presents a rigorous, modern account of the mathematical methods and tools required for the semantic analysis of logic programs. It significantly extends the tools and methods from traditional order theory to include nonconventional methods from mathematical analysis that depend on topology, domain theory, generalized distance functions, and associated fixed-point theory. The authors closely examine the interrelationships between various semantics as well as the integration of logic programming and connectionist systems/neural networks.

Prolog for logic programming is one of the most intensively studied software languages in the 1980s. During the same period, the data-flow model for parallel computation attracted a lot of attention of researchers in the computer science; hence, it was very natural that several approaches were tried toward combining the two and implementing logic programs in parallel machines with the data-flow architecture. These approaches, however, were rather indirect ones in the sense that they developed programs describing AND/OR-parallelism for deduction using a data-flow language and executed them in a data-flow computer, and yet did not devise a direct' model for parallel execution (reasoning) of a logic program. This book discusses fuzzy logic inferencing for Pong; dislog; SEProlog; and provides direct graphical representations of first-order logic for inference.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming, FLOPS 2020, held in Akita, Japan*, in September 2020. The 12 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions. They cover all aspects of the design, semantics, theory, applications, implementations, and teaching of declarative programming focusing on topics such as functional programming, logic programming, declarative programming, constraint programming, formal method, model checking, program transformation, program refinement, and type theory. *The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.