Prolog Programming For Artificial Intelligence 3 E

This edition discusses natural language processing with grammar rules, planning and machine learning, and includes coverage of meta-programming, meta-interpreters and object-oriented programming in Prolog.

The computer programming language Prolog is quickly gaining popularity throughout the world. Since Its beginnings around 1970. Prolog has been chosen by many programmers for applications of symbolic computation. including: D relational databases D mathematical logic D abstract problem solving D understanding natural language D architectural design D symbolic equation solving D biochemical structure analysis D many areas of artificial Intelligence Until now. there has been no textbook with the aim of teaching Prolog as a practical programming language. It Is perhaps a tribute to Prolog that so many people have been motivated to learn It by referring to the necessarily concise reference manuals. a few published papers. and by the orally transmitted 'folklore' of the modern computing community. However. as Prolog is beginning to be Introduced to large numbers of undergraduate and postgraduate students. many of our colleagues have expressed a great need for a tutorial guide to learning Prolog. We hope this little book will go some way towards meeting this need. Many newcomers to Prolog find that the task of writing a Prolog program Is not like specifying an algorithm in the same way as In a conventional programming language. Instead. the Prolog programmer asks more what formal relationships and objects occur In his problem.

We have added new material to Chapter 3 to give an account of up-to-date programming techniques using accumulators and difference structures. Chapter 8 contains some new information on syntax errors. Operator precedences are now compatible with the most widely-used implementations. We have made further reorganisations and improvements in presentation, and have corrected a number of minor errors. We thank the many people who brought typographical errors in the previous edition to our attention, and we thank A.R.C. for careful proofreading. Cambridge, England W.F.C. January,1987 C.S.M. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION (1984) Since the first publishing of Programming in Prolog in 1981, Prolog has continued to attract an unexpectedly great deal of interest in the computer science community and is now seen as a potential basis for an important new generation of programming languages and systems. We hope that Programming in Prolog has partially satisfied the increasing need for an easy, yet comprehensive introduction to the language as a tool for practical programming. In this second edition we have taken the opportunity to improve the presentation and to correct various minor errors in the original. We thank the many people who have given us suggestions for corrections and improvement. Cambridge, England W.F.C.

Covering what is needed in a one-year or even one-semester introductory Prolog course, this book assumes access to any suitable Prolog or PD Prolog interpreter, such as LPA Prolog. It aims to introduce students to Prolog in a straightforward way and where AI topics are included, they are the easier ones and are treated simply.

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.