Addressed to readers at different levels of programming expertise, The Practice ofProlog offers a departure from current books that focus on small programming examples requiringadditional instruction in order to extend them to full programming projects. It shows how to designand organize moderate to large Prolog programs, providing a collection of eight programmingprojects, each with a particular application, and illustrating how a Prolog program was written tosolve the application. These range from a simple learning program to designing a database formolecular biology to natural language generation from plans and stream data analysis.Leon Sterlingis Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Science at Case Western ReserveUniversity. He is the coauthor, along with Ehud Shapiro, of The Art of Prolog.Contents: A SimpleLearning Program, Richard O'Keefe. Designing a Prolog Database for Molecular Biology, Ewing Lusk,Robert Olson, Ross Overbeek, Steve Tuecke. Parallelizing a Pascal Compiler, Eran Gabber. PREDITOR: AProlog-Based VLSI Editor, Peter B. Reintjes. Assisting Register Transfer Level Hardware Design, PaulDrongowski. Design and Implementation of aPartial Evaluation System, Arun Lakhotia, Leon Sterling.Natural Language Generation from Plans, Chris Mellish. Stream Data Analysis in Prolog, Stott Parker.

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.

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.

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.

This book covers all that is needed by students on a one-year introductory Prolog course at first or second year degree level. It introduces Prolog to students as simply and painlessly as possible. Where Artificial Intelligence (AI) topics are introduced, they are easier ones and are treated simply. This book is Prolog for Students, with examples from AI, not a book on AI using Prolog. The text assumes access to a suitable, good, Prolog interpreter, such as LPA Prolog. It also assumes that students with an aptitude for research will follow it up with more advanced study, perhaps a third or fourth year option, and further reading suggestions are included. The book is organised with the basics of the subject introduced first, and covered gradually, so they can be fully understood before moving on to harder topics. The topics that students find more difficult, such as recursion and lists, are not covered until about half way through the book. There are many in-text questions, student self-testing questions and programming practice exercises throughout the book. If used to accompany a taught course, the material of one chapter can be covered in each week. This book covers all that is needed by students on a one-year introductory Prolog course at first or second year degree level. It introduces Prolog to students as simply and painlessly as possible. Where Artificial Intelligence (AI) topics are introduced, they are easier ones and are treated simply. This book is Prolog for Students, with examples from AI, not a book on AI using Prolog. The text assumes access to a suitable, good, Prolog interpreter, such as LPA Prolog. It also assumes that students with an aptitude for research will follow it up with more advanced study, perhaps a third or fourth year option, and further reading suggestions are included. The book is organised with the basics of the subject introduced first, and covered gradually, so they can be fully understood before moving on to harder topics. The topics that students find more difficult, such as recursion and lists, are not covered until about half way through the book. There are many in-text questions, student self-testing questions and programming practice exercises throughout the book. If used to accompany a taught course, the material of one chapter can be covered in each week.

The emphasis in The Craft of Prolog is on using Prolog effectively. It presents a loose collection of topics that build on and elaborate concepts learned in a first course. Hacking your program is no substitute for understanding your problem. Prolog is different, but not that different. Elegance is not optional. These are the themes that unify Richard O'Keefe's very personal statement on how Prolog programs should be written. The emphasis in The Craft of Prolog is on using Prolog effectively. It presents a loose collection of topics that build on and elaborate concepts learned in a first course. These may be read in any order following the first chapter, "Basic Topics in Prolog," which provides a basis for the rest of the material in the book. Richard A. O'Keefe is Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is also a consultant to Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.Contents: Basic Topics in Prolog. Searching. Where Does the Space Go? Methods of Programming. Data Structure Design. Sequences. Writing Interpreters. Some Notes on Grammar Rules. Prolog Macros. Writing Tokenisers in Prolog. All Solutions.

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.

Knowledge representation and reasoning is the foundation of artificial intelligence, declarative programming, and the design of knowledge-intensive software systems capable of performing intelligent tasks. Using logical and probabilistic formalisms based on answer set programming (ASP) and action languages, this book shows how knowledge-intensive systems can be given knowledge about the world and how it can be used to solve non-trivial computational problems. The authors maintain a balance between mathematical analysis and practical design of intelligent agents. All the concepts, such as answering queries, planning, diagnostics, and probabilistic reasoning, are illustrated by programs of ASP. The text can be used for AI-related undergraduate and graduate classes and by researchers who would like to learn more about ASP and knowledge representation.

An examination of natural language processing in Prolog for those who know Prolog but not linguistics, this book enables students to move quickly into writing and working in useful software. It features many working computer programs that implement subsystems of a natural language processor. These programs are designed to be understood in isolation from one another and are compatible with an Edinburgh-compatible Prolog implementation, such as Quintus, ESL, Arity and ALS.