Syllabus of Logic Programming in Prolog

Goals

The goal of this course is to give an overview of a new programming paradigm: programming by means of logic (also known as logic programming). The language to illustrate it is Prolog. The simplicity of first-order inference makes it a good candidate to explore this field. The similarities between Prolog programming and querying databases inductively, e.g., by means of Datalog, are mentioned. The course is complemented by notes on the larger field of artificial intelligence (AI), in particular abstract neural networks and their application to pattern recognition and clustering.

How to achieve the goals

The complete slide presentation is already available at the author's web site, so students should read some slides in advance before attending the corresponding class. This way, they also can get a clear meaning of the language --- since this course is taught in English. Exercises will be given during class in order to assess student's understanding and for training purposes. Two quizzes will be formally given too. Each time, the answers will be available from the author's web site in a short delay.

Textbook

Many textbooks are available in English and Korean but this course will be founded upon regular programming homeworks instead of reading.

Topics

1. • Foreword, personal presentation to the students, presentation of the course topics, the didactic objectives, the textbook.
   • Explanation of the teaching method and that the slides are already available from the author's web site.
   • Programming in logic with Prolog
   • A deductive database
   • Relations and facts (example of a family tree)
2. • Clauses and instances
   • Substitution of variables
   • What is a ground query? An open query? A conjunctive query?
   • Goals, subgoals and predicates
3. • Binary relations
   • Inverse relation
   • Rule, head and body
   • More on instantiation
4. • Querying the family tree again
   • Exercises
5. First quiz
6. • Recursive rules
   • First glimpse of the resolution algorithm
   • Backtracking
   • Examples with basic logical connectors
7. • The proof tree as a trace of answer to a query
   • Inference rules
   • Examples
8. Mid-term examination
9. • Objects, atoms, constants, variables
   • Notion of lexical scoping
   • Structures and functors
   • Prolog terms as trees
10. • Exercises
    • Matching in more details
    • Closed and open terms
    • Variable binding (revisiting substitution and instantiation)
    • Examples from geometry
11. Second quiz
12. • Declarative and procedural meaning of a Prolog program (or: truth and finding the truth)
    • Resolution algorithm in details
    • Examples
13. • Tuples and their tree representation
    • Lists
    • Lack of static typing in Prolog
    • Arithmetic operators and their interaction with backtracking
    • Numerical comparisons versus matching
14. • Exercises on lists
15. • The Eight Queens Problem solved in details
16. Final examination