What is Prolog?
Prolog stands for “programming in logic”. It was invented in 1971 by Alan Colmereaur of Marceille for use in the study of natural language processing”. It is based on a “logical inferencing mechanism known as the “resolution principle” which was proposed by J. A. Robinson in 1965. Prolog and Lisp are important programming languages within the realm of cognitive science. When people think of Prolog, they tend to think of: • objects and relations • knowledge bases made up of facts and rules • queries posed in the context of knowledge bases • high level processing (it is relatively easy to do some work) • a fragile programming language (it breaks easily) • an opaque programming language (it is hard to read the code) • matching and logical inference • a nice grammar feature for language processing For now, just think of Prolog as a means for representing, manipulating, and querying knowledge.
