#1 - The Poet of Logic Programming

April 24, 2020 • 96 Minutes

prolog history AI rules engines ASP

An interview with Robert Kowalski, the co-creator of the field of logic programming and of the Prolog language. The conversation ranges over the history of Prolog, the ill-famed Fifth Generation Computer Systems project, the relation between symbolic AI and connectionist AI including deep learning, why rule engines fail at logic, and the future of logic programming.

Show notes

08:10

John Alan Robinson

Computational Logic: Memories of the Past and Challenges for the Future

Maarten van Emden has great material about Robinson, including two interviews:

https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/alan-robinson/

https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/interview-with-alan-robinson-inventor-of-resolution-logic/

http://aarinc.org/Newsletters/089-2010-10.html#robinson

08:55

The Early Years of Logic Programming (Kowalski)

12:05

The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program

12:45

Horn clause logic

14:32

Dual process theory

Thinking, Fast and Slow (book)

16:30

Alternatives to logical representations of knowledge

Semantic networks

And–or trees

https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/History.pdf

17:10

“Minsky’s frames”

17:30

Non-monotonic logic

18:10

First-order logic

20:45

List concatenation (the append/3 predicate)

23:55

Datalog

Answer Set Programming

25:50

Cordell Green

26:50

“it was Cordell who was interested in knowledge representation”

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project, memo Al-96 — The Application of Theorem Proving to Question-Answering Systems

Theorem-Proving by Resolution as a Basis for Question-Answering Systems

29:50

Planner

Terry Winograd

35:00

Monads in functional programming

40:10

Alain Colmerauer

Un Systeme de Communication Homme-Machine en Francais

42:00

Pat Hayes

https://www.ihmc.us/groups/phayes/

43:15

The Birth of Prolog (Alain Colmerauer and Philippe Roussel)

46:00

Computational Logic and Human Thinking: How to be Artificially Intelligent

49:00

The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking (Barbara Minto)

51:00

Unification

52:20

Backtracking

56:10

Production rules

57:10

Expert systems

01:08:30

The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project

1:09:50

MapReduce

1:17:00

Event calculus

1:18:20

Logic Production Systems

1:19:40

Logical Contracts (company)

1:29:45

“Minsky’s attack on the perceptron”

Felix Holmgren

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