AI Languages Research Articles

The prolog phenomenon

In 1968, Carl Hewitt introduce PLANNER, a "procedural deductive system." [Hewitt 72] It featured some very innovative concepts for the theorem-proving community of that time: the procedural interpretation of deduction, pattern-directed procedure invocation, an indexed data base of assertions and programs, and nondeterminism (backtracking). A simple version was implemented by Sussman, Winograd and Charniak [Sussman 71] and used by Winograd in his exciting work on natural language. [Winograd 72] A very similar language, QA4, was implemented on the West Coast. [Rulifson 72] These languages, known by the ambitious term "AI languages," were widely perceived as providing built-in facilities that everyone would need for the next generation of AI systems, the way LISP had provided facilities for the previous one.

An iterative lisp solution to the samefringe problem

The "samefringe" problem of testing trees for equality of tips (even if the trees have a different internal structure) seems to be the main example used to illustrate the usefulness of coroutines in AI languages.

Web-based Delivery Of AI/Expert System CoursesIn Engineering Education

This paper describes on-going work at University College Galway on the use of Web-based interactive courseware which, in addition to the usual situation of presenting courses as static hypertext documents including text and graphics allows the students to access AI languages and expert system components directly from their web browser. The system is at beta test stage and is being used in courses on AI languages (LISP and Prolog) to engineering and computer science students.