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Use Prolog to improve LLM's reasoning

(shchegrikovich.substack.com)
232 points shchegrikovich | 1 comments | 13 Oct 24 21:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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z5h ◴[17 Oct 24 21:07 UTC] No.41873798[source]▶
i've come to appreciate, over the past 2 years of heavy Prolog use, that all coding should be (eventually) be done in Prolog.

It's one of few languages that is simultaneously a standalone logical formalism, and a standalone representation of computation. (With caveats and exceptions, I know). So a Prolog program can stand in as a document of all facts, rules and relations that a person/organization understands/declares to be true. Even if AI writes code for us, we should expect to have it presented and manipulated as a logical formalism.

Now if someone cares to argue that some other language/compiler is better at generating more performant code on certain architectures, then that person can declare their arguments in a logical formalism (Prolog) and we can use Prolog to translate between language representations, compile, optimize, etc.

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tomcam ◴[17 Oct 24 22:47 UTC] No.41874594[source]▶
Is it your thought that for the average programmer Prolog is easier to read and maintain than say Go, C#, or Java?
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1. z5h ◴[18 Oct 24 01:32 UTC] No.41875574[source]▶
I'm surprised at how readable Prolog is.

I've played with and seriously used many languages in my career. My experience is that pure functional (done Elm style) is productive and scales well to a larger team. Dynamic stuff like Ruby/Javascript always has more bugs than you think, even with "full" test coverage. I'm not smart enough to make sense of my own Scheme meta-programming when I revisit it months later. I have loads (but dated) experience with Java and it (and peers) are relatively easy to read and maintain.

Prolog is very surprising, because it is homoiconic and immensely powerful in metaprogramming, BUT ... the declarative style and execution model reigns in the complexity/readability. A term is just a term. Nothing happens when you create a term. If/when a term is a goal, then you match it with the head of an existing predicate (something you've already coded). So it never gets too messy. Now, the biggest problem with Prolog is that it's so flexible, you'll perpetually be realizing that you could have coded something much more cleanly. So you do that, have less, code, it's nicer, etc. Doing this on a large team might not scale without effort.