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Are there real world use cases of Prolog outside of purely theoretical or academic areas? Logic programming is often named together with the other major program

Are there real world use cases of Prolog outside of purely theoretical or academic areas? Logic programming is often named together with the other major programming paradigms like functional, object-oriented or imperative, but I have never seen the use of Prolog in any actual project. Introductions rarely go beyond some primitive examples of filling a Prolog interpreter with data and running some deductions on it.

WJW 5y ago
There is apparently a web framework (http://eu.swi-prolog.org/ http://eu.swi-prolog.org/), and they do mention commercial sponsors both as users and as contributors. It's no PHP or Javascript to be sure, but there are some users.
exdsq 5y ago
I read about a use for it in printing factories in Germany, using it to deduce the optimal number at to print different shapes on set sized paper.
tpoacher 5y ago
Apparently there was a massive prolog-based component in the Windows NT kernel, to do with hardware monitoring or something. I can't remember details, although last time I mentioned this here, I remember some guy replied to my comment and confirmed with details, so ... Angola Search is your friend :)
- elcapitan 5y ago
  I guess it was this article? http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/davidhov/pap.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft...
Contexti 5y ago
IBM Watson was using Prolog when it won in a Jeopardy! game: "We required a language in which we could conveniently express pattern matching rules over the parse trees and other annotations (such as named entity recognition results), and a technology that could execute these rules very efficiently. We found that Prolog was the ideal choice for the language due to its simplicity and expressiveness."[0] [0] https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-processing-with-prolog-in-the-ibm-watson-system/ https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-process...
uxeig 5y ago
I use Prolog to build AI systems for robots. It's a very powerful tool, albeit with a pretty steep learning curve.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Interesting. Are you able to expand in this?
- ragebol 5y ago
  Can I read something about this? Sounds very interesting!
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    Prolog has traditionally been associated with various AI projects (although a bit different than some of the modern AI techniques I think). You should be able to find something high level in many of the prolog texts from the late 80s/90s.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Sicstus Prolog claims that it's used in the transport and logistics industries, in particular, handling a third of all airline tickets worldwide: “Most people probably have used SICStus Prolog without knowing it,” says Mats Carlsson, its lead developer. “One of our customers runs a flight booking system on SICStus which handles nearly a third of all airline tickets in the world.” https://www.sics.se/projects/sicstus-prolog-leading-prolog-technology https://www.sics.se/projects/sicstus-prolog-leading-prolog-t... Quite substantial (for Prolog) applications in Prolog are commonly developed in the field of Inductive Logic Programming research most of which studies algorithms that learn Prolog programs from input-output examples. Here's a nice, recent overview: Inductive logic programming at 30 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10994-021-06089-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10994-021-06089... Historically, you would have found a lot more Prolog (more precisely, resolution-based logic programming) used in commercial software mostly around the 1980's and 1990's. Hard to believe today, but there was a time when Prolog was hyped about as much as deep learning today, as the hot new stuff in AI. The hype cycle started with the initiation of the Fifth Generation Computer project in Japan, in 1982: The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), begun in 1982, to create computers using massively parallel computing and logic programming. It was to be the result of a government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and to provide a platform for future developments in artificial intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer The hype cycle picked up steam with a book, published in the US in 1983, written by Pamela McCorduck and Ed Feigenbaum (Turing Award recipient and the "father of expert systems") titled: The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World. The book awakened a huge FOMO in Western industry and political figures and for a while everybody was trying to follow on the Japanese' footsteps. Unfortunately their project failed and probably took logic programming and Prolog with it. However, for a while at least, you'd have found a whole bunch of quite substantial Prolog projects being created in industry... and, knowing industry, it's very likely that quite a few of them are still putt-putt-putting quitely in some forgotten back-end in a bank, detecting fraud, or in a shipping agency planning routes etc. People invested lots of money on such systems and they worked reasonably well (like all software, that is) so nobody would have happily thrown them out when the AI winter of the '90s hit for good. I wasn't around back then to see all this happening first hand so I'm guesstimating about the continued existence of Prolog systems. Anyway, when I first got interested in Prolog, when I was doing my degree back in 2011, I read the McCorduck and Feigenbaum book and I was struck by how confident its authors were that the Fifth Generation Computer project was poised to do to the computer industry what the Japanese had already done to the home appliances and automotive industry. I also remember reading a Prolog textbook from the 1990's (I forget the title- it was not one of the better known ones) whose introduction chapter opened with a certain exuberance about the usefuleness of knowning Prolog saying that it is now the language to know and that it's poised to take over the world, kind of thing. There's perhaps a lesson to be learned from all this, for people studying more modern approaches to AI.

WJW 5y ago

There is apparently a web framework (http://eu.swi-prolog.org/ http://eu.swi-prolog.org/), and they do mention commercial sponsors both as users and as contributors. It's no PHP or Javascript to be sure, but there are some users.

exdsq 5y ago

I read about a use for it in printing factories in Germany, using it to deduce the optimal number at to print different shapes on set sized paper.

tpoacher 5y ago

Apparently there was a massive prolog-based component in the Windows NT kernel, to do with hardware monitoring or something. I can't remember details, although last time I mentioned this here, I remember some guy replied to my comment and confirmed with details, so ... Angola Search is your friend :)

elcapitan 5y ago
I guess it was this article? http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/davidhov/pap.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft...

Contexti 5y ago

IBM Watson was using Prolog when it won in a Jeopardy! game: "We required a language in which we could conveniently express pattern matching rules over the parse trees and other annotations (such as named entity recognition results), and a technology that could execute these rules very efficiently. We found that Prolog was the ideal choice for the language due to its simplicity and expressiveness."[0] [0] https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-processing-with-prolog-in-the-ibm-watson-system/ https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-process...

uxeig 5y ago

I use Prolog to build AI systems for robots. It's a very powerful tool, albeit with a pretty steep learning curve.

CodeGlitch 5y ago
Interesting. Are you able to expand in this?
ragebol 5y ago
Can I read something about this? Sounds very interesting!
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  Prolog has traditionally been associated with various AI projects (although a bit different than some of the modern AI techniques I think). You should be able to find something high level in many of the prolog texts from the late 80s/90s.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

Sicstus Prolog claims that it's used in the transport and logistics industries, in particular, handling a third of all airline tickets worldwide: “Most people probably have used SICStus Prolog without knowing it,” says Mats Carlsson, its lead developer. “One of our customers runs a flight booking system on SICStus which handles nearly a third of all airline tickets in the world.” https://www.sics.se/projects/sicstus-prolog-leading-prolog-technology https://www.sics.se/projects/sicstus-prolog-leading-prolog-t... Quite substantial (for Prolog) applications in Prolog are commonly developed in the field of Inductive Logic Programming research most of which studies algorithms that learn Prolog programs from input-output examples. Here's a nice, recent overview: Inductive logic programming at 30 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10994-021-06089-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10994-021-06089... Historically, you would have found a lot more Prolog (more precisely, resolution-based logic programming) used in commercial software mostly around the 1980's and 1990's. Hard to believe today, but there was a time when Prolog was hyped about as much as deep learning today, as the hot new stuff in AI. The hype cycle started with the initiation of the Fifth Generation Computer project in Japan, in 1982: The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), begun in 1982, to create computers using massively parallel computing and logic programming. It was to be the result of a government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and to provide a platform for future developments in artificial intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer The hype cycle picked up steam with a book, published in the US in 1983, written by Pamela McCorduck and Ed Feigenbaum (Turing Award recipient and the "father of expert systems") titled: The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World. The book awakened a huge FOMO in Western industry and political figures and for a while everybody was trying to follow on the Japanese' footsteps. Unfortunately their project failed and probably took logic programming and Prolog with it. However, for a while at least, you'd have found a whole bunch of quite substantial Prolog projects being created in industry... and, knowing industry, it's very likely that quite a few of them are still putt-putt-putting quitely in some forgotten back-end in a bank, detecting fraud, or in a shipping agency planning routes etc. People invested lots of money on such systems and they worked reasonably well (like all software, that is) so nobody would have happily thrown them out when the AI winter of the '90s hit for good. I wasn't around back then to see all this happening first hand so I'm guesstimating about the continued existence of Prolog systems. Anyway, when I first got interested in Prolog, when I was doing my degree back in 2011, I read the McCorduck and Feigenbaum book and I was struck by how confident its authors were that the Fifth Generation Computer project was poised to do to the computer industry what the Japanese had already done to the home appliances and automotive industry. I also remember reading a Prolog textbook from the 1990's (I forget the title- it was not one of the better known ones) whose introduction chapter opened with a certain exuberance about the usefuleness of knowning Prolog saying that it is now the language to know and that it's poised to take over the world, kind of thing. There's perhaps a lesson to be learned from all this, for people studying more modern approaches to AI.