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258 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 15 Apr 25 17:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.532s | source
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sterlind ◴[15 Apr 25 17:41 UTC] No.43696088[source]▶
really happy to see something of a revival of interest for logic programming lately. it's an extremely powerful tool if you know when to reach for it.
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MarkMarine ◴[15 Apr 25 17:59 UTC] No.43696328[source]▶
When would you reach for it?
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iLemming ◴[15 Apr 25 18:31 UTC] No.43696708[source]▶
Scheduling, e.g., course scheduling - allocating rooms, professors, time slots while satisfying constraints; Product configuration systems - helping customers select compatible options for complex products; Genealogical research - querying family relationships and ancestry; Static analysis tools for code - finding bugs or verifying properties without execution; Medical diagnosis systems - inferring conditions from symptoms based on medical knowledge; Travel planning - finding optimal routes with multiple constraints; Legal reasoning systems - determining applicability of laws to specific cases; Natural language interfaces - parsing questions and generating appropriate database queries; Hardware verification - proving correctness of circuit designs; Puzzle solvers - Sudoku, crosswords, logic puzzles;

Basically anything that excels when declarative specification of relationships is more natural than imperative algorithms.

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1. barrenko ◴[16 Apr 25 09:50 UTC] No.43703416[source]▶
I really don't know not nearly enough about the topic - but couldn't a lot of these be handled with types, so my question is - are types at least adjacent to logical programming? (apologies in advance)
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2. iLemming ◴[16 Apr 25 14:19 UTC] No.43705916[source]▶
Yes, afaik there is meaningful relevance between logic programming and type systems - Curry-Howard; Dependent types; SMT solvers (related to SAT solvers mentioned in this discussion). However, constraint problems discussed (scheduling, travel planning, puzzles) would require quite verbose and complex encoding to solve with a type system and significant sophistication - Idris or Coq aren't for the faint-hearted.

Type systems would absolutely choke on trying to solve things like: Knowlege representation and querying - imagine medical diagnosis systems with thousands symptoms and conditions; Dynamic constraint solving - where constraints emerge at runtime; Exploratory search problems requiring bfs/dfs of large solution spaces - e.g., route finding with changing conditions; NLP tasks - grammar parsing and understanding; etc.