Use Prolog to improve LLM's reasoning

But what I actually find is the more time spent in Prolog, the more natural it is to express things in a way that is clear, logical and performant. As with any language/paradigm, there are a few gotchas to be experienced. But generally speaking, SLD resolution has never once been an obstacle (in the past 2 years) of coding.

The general execution model of Prolog is pretty simple. The lack of functions actually makes meta-programming much clearer and simpler. A term is just data, unless it's stated as a goal. It's only a valid goal if you've already defined its meaning.

So I'd be concerned that Curry gives up the simplicity of Prolog's execution model, and ease of meta-programming. I struggle with the lack of types in Prolog, but also know I can (at least in theory) use Prolog to solve correctness problems in Prolog code.

I'm currently using SWI-Prolog. Performance is excellent, it has excellent high-level concurrency primitives[0] (when was the last time you pegged all your cores solving a problem?), and many libraries. I might be one of the few people who has committed to using the integrated editor (PceEmacs) despite being a Vim person. PceEmacs is just too good at syntax highlighting and error detection.

At the same time, I'm a huge fan of Markus Triska. His Youtube[1] stuff is mind-expanding (watch all of it, even if you never write Prolog). He has an excellent book online[2]. I admire the way he explains and advances pure monotonic Prolog, and I appreciate the push for ISO conformance and his support for Prologs that that do the same (SWI is not on that list).

If you want to learn Prolog, watch all of Markus Triska's videos, read his book, and learn what Prolog could be in a perfect world. Then download SWI-Prolog, and maybe break some rules while getting things done at a blazing speed. Eventually you'll gravitate to what makes sense for you.

The Art of Prolog is a classic "must have". Clause and Effect is a good "hit the ground running" (on page 70 you're into symbolic differentiation via term rewriting).

0 https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=thread

1 https://www.youtube.com/@ThePowerOfProlog

2 https://www.metalevel.at/prolog

Still checking every now and then if SICStus has open sourced. I used Prolog daily during my PhD and SICStus had such nice features. E.g. it could raise an exception when no more heap space can be allocated or when a 'call' would not finish within a given time. These features made it much easier to use Prolog in real-world systems (this was a parsing system and when parsing a very large corpus, this was highly preferable over simply crashing the interpreter).

Maybe things have changed, but this wasn't possible with SWI at the time. Even worse, most C extensions would use malloc directly, making it impossible to track allocations done by extensions.

I figured it would be a good introduction to prolog, but to date there doesn't seem to be any prolog interpreter that lets me copy the things in the book to play with them?

That was my concern with the paper listed above also. Functional syntax is to my mind needlessly over-complicated. Types are useful but you can roll your own if you need them, and Prolog makes that easy enough.

>> I'm currently using SWI-Prolog. Performance is excellent, it has excellent high-level concurrency primitives[0] (when was the last time you pegged all your cores solving a problem?), and many libraries. I might be one of the few people who has committed to using the integrated editor (PceEmacs) despite being a Vim person. PceEmacs is just too good at syntax highlighting and error detection.

Hah! Hello fellow PCEmacs >> vim user :D

Markus Triska's stuff is good and he's undeniably an expert in Prolog programming, I mean duh, but he and a couple of others have needlessly caused a rift in the Prolog community (mainly between themselves and everyone else) by being so stroppy about the ISO non-conformance of SWI-Prolog. I hope Markus is reading this. The Prolog community is very small and dwindling and we can't afford such drama. We need more Prolog compilers, yes, ISO conformance is good, yes, but SWI-Prolog is a robust and battle-tested implementation and it is the ISO standard that should be leaning on its experience of being a real-world Prolog used by real programmers and not just the other way around.

There used to be a free (though proprietary) version of Quintus, the predecessor of SICStus. It might still be around somewhere if you look hard enough.

That made my day! Hello!

It's really surprising to see someone at his level, a software reliability researcher no less, retain that level of passion about something. Usually folks with that level of experience are really grumpy and lose the evangelistic flair. I tend to maintain that level of evangelism about things I'm passionate for but no one would ever accuse me of being a "reliability researcher", lol.

In fact, I was/am a hardcore lisp hacker, and never in my life did I think I'd find something that would even come close to lisp for me. because it's FUN! but I'll be damned if Prolog isn't turning out to be even more fun in ways I didn't expect.

In fact the only thing I really miss about lisp at this point is structural editing (paredit and such).

And it's not like it's either/or, you can use both. But learning pure Prolog is really delightful if you follow the breadcrumbs (gold nuggets, honestly) Markus left.

If it doesn't kill you, that is!