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As Kowalski has acknowledged and reported by others, Prolog was invented as a subset of Planner that only implemented backward chaining. See the following for

As Kowalski has acknowledged and reported by others, Prolog was invented as a subset of Planner that only implemented backward chaining. See the following for further information: "Middle History of Logic Programming: Resolution, Planner, Prolog and the Japanese Fifth Generation Project" ArXiv 2009. https://dev.arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036 https://dev.arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
inetsee 6y ago
The link provided takes me to a "Test server", and an abstract titled "Inconsistency Robustness in Logic Programs". Clicking on the pdf download link returns "Not Found". Searching arxiv for "middle history of logic programming" produces no results. I would really like to read more about Planner, but I have had no luck searching for this paper.
- buescher 6y ago
  https://www.cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/classes/cs550/data/middle-hist-lp.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/classes/cs550/data/middle-h...
  - inetsee 6y ago
    Thank you very much for helping me find this paper, but I am still somewhat confused. When I couldn't find the paper in arxiv, it didn't occur me at first to go back to the beginning and use a general search engine. When I did plug the title into DDG it took me to arxiv, which had the expected abstract and a working link to the pdf. But doing another search in arxiv returned "No Results", even though I had put in the exact title from the abstract I was just looking at. A little more digging uncovered the fact that the paper in question has gone through 41 revisions, and somewhere along the line the title was changed from "Middle History of Logic Programming: Resolution, Planner, Edinburgh LCF, Prolog and the Japanese Fifth Generation Project" to "Inconsistency Robustness in Logic Programs", which is still rattling my brain a little bit. edit: The working link I found is https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036v22 https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036v22
    - andrekandre 6y ago
      thats interesting, one slightly different link i found was https://arxiv.org/pdf/0904.3036.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0904.3036.pdf seems like your link is versioned (v22) and the one i found was unversioned... i wonder which one is the latest...?
    - buescher 6y ago
      That's quite odd!
tom_mellior 6y ago
> As Kowalski has acknowledged and reported by others, Prolog was invented as a subset of Planner that only implemented backward chaining. From the featured article: "It was at this time that we learned of the existence of Carl Hewitt’s programming language, Planner [20]. The lack of formalization of this language, our ignorance of Lisp and, above all, the fact that we were absolutely devoted to logic meant that this work had little influence on our later research." Personally I think I'll believe Colmerauer on this one.
- ProfHewitt 6y ago
  Thanks Tom! Being a linguist of note, Colmerauer evidently didn't know (or didn't want to admit) that Kowalski had been carefully studying Planner and Shrdlu (Winograd's Phd thesis based on Planner) for quite a while in Edinburgh, where he felt quite in the minority defending pure mathematical logic against the onslaught of Popler (Pop2 Planner), etc. The formalization issue was addressed by the invention of Actors for all of digital computation including many computations that cannot be performed using pure logic programming (including Colmerauer's Prolog). Furthermore, many practical applications can be implemented using Actors hundreds of times faster than they can be implemented using pure logic programming. PS. Have you actually read the article "Middle History of Logic Programming: Resolution, Planner, Prolog and the Japanese Fifth Generation Project" ArXiv 2009. https://dev.arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036 https://dev.arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036
  - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    Kowalski himself says that he thought that Planner was similar to resolution and the simialrities were not well understood at MIT. The following is my transcription of Kowalski being interviewed for thesearch.space podcast. I surround with square brackets places where I didn't understand or I am unsure of what was said: At MIT criticism of resolution which led to the development of the Planner language of Carl Hewitt and its use by Terry Winograd to implement a large portion of his PhD thesis which was extremely influential at the time... and this was promoted as an alternative to logic and as a procedural representation of knowledge as opposed to a declarative representation of knowledge. So this [muddied] the waters [so to speak] and it created enormous confusion. On the one hand you have resolution [...] logic and its applications to problem-solving, then you have the Planner language which is characterised as a procedural approach alternative to logic and yet it was clear to me that there where [similar to others] the Planner language had similarities to resolution which which were not understood and it was trying to understand that relationship and that similarity that I would say gave rise to logic programmign as I characterised it so far. The podcast can be found here (I'm not afiliated with it in any way): https://thesearch.space/ https://thesearch.space/ The passage above starts at around 29:53. My apologies for the poor quality of the transliteration. >> Planner and Shrdlu (Winograd's Phd thesis based on Planner) Terry Winograd's SHRDLU remains pretty much unsurpassed as a system even today. Wikipedia quotes an excerpt from Winograd's thesis that lists a dialogue between SHRDLU and its user. There's a particular exchange that blows my mind every single time I read it: Person: Does the shortest thing the tallest pyramid's support supports support anything green? Computer: YES, THE GREEN PYRAMID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU I mean, at that point he's just showing off! I can only imagine him snickering to himself imagining the faces of people reading that. Still, for me personally resolution has proved to be the right way to go, historically. In particular, I'm prepared to bet that Terry Winograd would have saved himself a lot of pain had he been able to use Prolog's Definite Clause Grammars to write SHRDLU's natural English parser. In Prolog, a grammar, even a natural language grammar, is a theorem and parsing it is a proof, just like for every other program; in every other language a grammar is the input to a program that must be written specially for the task of parsing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

inetsee 6y ago

The link provided takes me to a "Test server", and an abstract titled "Inconsistency Robustness in Logic Programs". Clicking on the pdf download link returns "Not Found". Searching arxiv for "middle history of logic programming" produces no results. I would really like to read more about Planner, but I have had no luck searching for this paper.

buescher 6y ago
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/classes/cs550/data/middle-hist-lp.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/classes/cs550/data/middle-h...
- inetsee 6y ago
  Thank you very much for helping me find this paper, but I am still somewhat confused. When I couldn't find the paper in arxiv, it didn't occur me at first to go back to the beginning and use a general search engine. When I did plug the title into DDG it took me to arxiv, which had the expected abstract and a working link to the pdf. But doing another search in arxiv returned "No Results", even though I had put in the exact title from the abstract I was just looking at. A little more digging uncovered the fact that the paper in question has gone through 41 revisions, and somewhere along the line the title was changed from "Middle History of Logic Programming: Resolution, Planner, Edinburgh LCF, Prolog and the Japanese Fifth Generation Project" to "Inconsistency Robustness in Logic Programs", which is still rattling my brain a little bit. edit: The working link I found is https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036v22 https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036v22
  - andrekandre 6y ago
    thats interesting, one slightly different link i found was https://arxiv.org/pdf/0904.3036.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0904.3036.pdf seems like your link is versioned (v22) and the one i found was unversioned... i wonder which one is the latest...?
  - buescher 6y ago
    That's quite odd!

tom_mellior 6y ago

> As Kowalski has acknowledged and reported by others, Prolog was invented as a subset of Planner that only implemented backward chaining. From the featured article: "It was at this time that we learned of the existence of Carl Hewitt’s programming language, Planner [20]. The lack of formalization of this language, our ignorance of Lisp and, above all, the fact that we were absolutely devoted to logic meant that this work had little influence on our later research." Personally I think I'll believe Colmerauer on this one.

ProfHewitt 6y ago
Thanks Tom! Being a linguist of note, Colmerauer evidently didn't know (or didn't want to admit) that Kowalski had been carefully studying Planner and Shrdlu (Winograd's Phd thesis based on Planner) for quite a while in Edinburgh, where he felt quite in the minority defending pure mathematical logic against the onslaught of Popler (Pop2 Planner), etc. The formalization issue was addressed by the invention of Actors for all of digital computation including many computations that cannot be performed using pure logic programming (including Colmerauer's Prolog). Furthermore, many practical applications can be implemented using Actors hundreds of times faster than they can be implemented using pure logic programming. PS. Have you actually read the article "Middle History of Logic Programming: Resolution, Planner, Prolog and the Japanese Fifth Generation Project" ArXiv 2009. https://dev.arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036 https://dev.arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  Kowalski himself says that he thought that Planner was similar to resolution and the simialrities were not well understood at MIT. The following is my transcription of Kowalski being interviewed for thesearch.space podcast. I surround with square brackets places where I didn't understand or I am unsure of what was said: At MIT criticism of resolution which led to the development of the Planner language of Carl Hewitt and its use by Terry Winograd to implement a large portion of his PhD thesis which was extremely influential at the time... and this was promoted as an alternative to logic and as a procedural representation of knowledge as opposed to a declarative representation of knowledge. So this [muddied] the waters [so to speak] and it created enormous confusion. On the one hand you have resolution [...] logic and its applications to problem-solving, then you have the Planner language which is characterised as a procedural approach alternative to logic and yet it was clear to me that there where [similar to others] the Planner language had similarities to resolution which which were not understood and it was trying to understand that relationship and that similarity that I would say gave rise to logic programmign as I characterised it so far. The podcast can be found here (I'm not afiliated with it in any way): https://thesearch.space/ https://thesearch.space/ The passage above starts at around 29:53. My apologies for the poor quality of the transliteration. >> Planner and Shrdlu (Winograd's Phd thesis based on Planner) Terry Winograd's SHRDLU remains pretty much unsurpassed as a system even today. Wikipedia quotes an excerpt from Winograd's thesis that lists a dialogue between SHRDLU and its user. There's a particular exchange that blows my mind every single time I read it: Person: Does the shortest thing the tallest pyramid's support supports support anything green? Computer: YES, THE GREEN PYRAMID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU I mean, at that point he's just showing off! I can only imagine him snickering to himself imagining the faces of people reading that. Still, for me personally resolution has proved to be the right way to go, historically. In particular, I'm prepared to bet that Terry Winograd would have saved himself a lot of pain had he been able to use Prolog's Definite Clause Grammars to write SHRDLU's natural English parser. In Prolog, a grammar, even a natural language grammar, is a theorem and parsing it is a proof, just like for every other program; in every other language a grammar is the input to a program that must be written specially for the task of parsing.