prolog homework assistance

prolog homework assistance

A Comprehensive Guide to Prolog: Homework Assistance and Beyond

1. Introduction to Prolog

Logic and recursion can be dry topics when taught by traditional means in common languages, yet they are absolutely essential. Prolog was designed to encourage recursion, backtracking, and working with symbolic data structures by making such operations easy and efficient – even at the expense of other functions that more mainstream languages excel at, such as math, object-oriented programming, system programming, etc. The concepts in this guide, known as pattern matching, lists, and unification, among others, do exist in most languages, but they are only sophisticated tricks in other languages. Prolog’s forced neutrality allows students to experience the best that AI algorithms have to offer, without being bogged down in the heavy syntax and intricate semantics of a popular imperative language, particularly if new language features were consistently introduced at the same time.

Prolog is a programming language particularly well suited for symbolic and non-numeric AI tasks, including theorem proving, natural language parsing, and scheduling. Prolog is well suited for practice with recursion and logic issues that are often difficult areas for CS students. Homework problems for these topics are often appropriate for most programmers, yet often difficult for students. There are Prolog systems available free for all common platforms. Prolog’s lack of popularity has become a self-perpetuating stigma in computer science, by either intimidating students and professionals who refuse to learn Prolog in fear of academic difficulty, or causing suffering to those who do learn Prolog and find its drawbacks, at least as compared to students of other languages.

2. Basic Concepts and Syntax

By using Prolog, it is reasonable to assume that a conditional statement is organized in an informative way when the terminal displays the major and minor items, which are the head and body of the condition, respectively, arranged in corresponding positions. The major items and the minor items are proclamations about whether the concept is true and why, respectively. They are also indispensable modi operandi for posing and answering questions.

A more useful concept in Prolog is the rule, which establishes some condition for some domain. In mathematics, a conditional statement is a rule. In Prolog, the syntax of conditional statements predicts an almost unfathomable simplicity. A rule is constructed by typing the “if” part of a conditional statement, called the head, as one line without a carriage return or line feed expressed by the period as though it were at the end of a sentence. The “and” part of the conditional statement, called the body, is constructed by typing one line for each condition, a comma, and then not pressing the “Enter” key to break to a new line. The rule reiterates itself in Prolog by having a period at the end of the fact.

The basic building blocks in Prolog are facts and rules. A corresponding concept in mathematics is the unconditional statement. That is, facts convey some information and constitute the knowledge base about a given subject. In Prolog, a fact looks like what I think it looks like: a series of English words with punctuation.

3. Advanced Prolog Programming Techniques

So our goal for this chapter is to enhance our view of suitable advanced Prolog programs. We also discuss some interesting problems along the way that give good practice in using these advanced Prolog programming techniques. With these techniques under your belt, you should then be ready to tackle the original called-for team roster problem at the end of the previous chapter. Once again, remember that our goal is enhanced expertise with the advanced features of Prolog, always with an eye on writing English-like programs with it. Keep the English sentences you would like to be able to write in Prolog in the back of your mind as you read. Then you will have a goal that these ideas are contributing to and reinforce your understanding of these advanced techniques.

We have now seen all the features of the Prolog language in the sense that we have seen all we need in order to write successors and append like programs. In this chapter, we describe some advanced Prolog programming techniques. These techniques are not necessarily more basic in a logical sense than what we have seen so far. However, they are used in many programs and are examples of the type of techniques that should also allow you to write many programs. They are also used in large programs without ever causing trouble. It is important to have a large selection of tested simple techniques to build on.

4. Prolog Applications in Artificial Intelligence

The most natural Prolog applications are theorem-proving and question-answering. Programs written in the language represent knowledge about specific domains of interest. Given a cumbersome and complex information, Prolog resolves the user’s indeterminacies or misconceptions about the problem. The user introduces new information, and asks for CLIPS to use his information in making an inference. The language interprets new information inserted by the user, consults the frames that the user has indicated, and then processes the user’s request. Prolog can be taught to know about simple situations that lend themselves to description in terms of rules. The syntax of the language is very close to the logical relationships that exist among the point, the car, and the rules that are involved in allowing the car to be parked in the lot. The rule base contains a single fact and three rules. Facts and queries in CLIPS use the same frame syntax.

One of Prolog’s natural applications is the field of heuristic search. The program does not hesitate to expand one branch of the state space tree, while there are alternatives still to be explored. This is done by the best-first and the earlier branch-and-bound algorithms. Not infrequently it is necessary to use additional information about the problem domain to establish a so-called heuristic function, which estimates the cost to the goal state. The heuristic function is either supplied by the user, or derived from additional rules. It may be conservatively estimated in order to make the search coarser. The performance of the best-first search is in direct proportion to success of the heuristic function. Another common weakness of the algorithm is the inability to guarantee the best path.

5. Conclusion and Further Resources

You’re also prepared for a very useful extension for the kbHelp program that checks the course web in a couple of different ways. With these tools and their extensions (should you choose to try them), you’re now ready to learn more from effectively interacting with working programs rather than information in the abstract. That’s what makes you a computer scientist. Happy prologging!

– To do a wide variety of small homework assignments related to logic or data representations in your undergrad Math requirements, – To walk up to someone in AI Lab with a Prolog coding assignment and ask for help from those who didn’t take the A/B division course. – To browse through the Prolog links to additional topics and resources.

This should have prepared you:

– Annotated Prolog Code – Introduction to Prolog for Mathematicians – Prolog Beyond Depression – “Natural” Operations on Prolog Lists – Search and Optimization in Artificial Intelligence – A Calculator for Arbitrary Types – Procedural Language Elements in Logic Programming

In this tutorial, you’ve learned the basics of Prolog syntax, data types, structures, defining and querying knowledge-based Prolog facts and rules. You have also learned how to perform basic operations to process data in Prolog, and from there, written the procedure kbHelp/0, which prompts the user to define anything that Prolog doesn’t find in the data. We’ve also discussed some advanced topics, and you should now be able to dive into others: