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Use Prolog to improve LLM's reasoning

(shchegrikovich.substack.com)
379 points shchegrikovich | 2 comments | 13 Oct 24 21:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.407s | 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. pjmlp ◴[18 Oct 24 08:08 UTC] No.41877315[source]▶
As someone that went through a degree where Prolog and LP was cherisched, I would say yes, however LP might be even weirder to start into than even FP.

Many folks on our degree couldn't be happier when they didn't had to see Prolog ever again, while me and others went on to take our chances on the national LP challenge across universities.

Tarski's World was a good way back then to dive into what LP is all about, without being programming language specific.

https://www.gradegrinder.net/Products/tw-index.html

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2. YeGoblynQueenne ◴[18 Oct 24 13:06 UTC] No.41879084[source]▶
Out of curiosity, in which university did you study for your degree?

I did my MSc in Sussex Uni which was one of the centers in the UK where logic programming was developed, but when I got there in 2014 there was no trace of that history. From conversations with professors and past students it seems that Sussex tried to ram Prolog hard down students' throats and that caused a furious backlash so that nobody wanted to hear about it anymore after the '90s to early 2000's.