The Search Space Transistor (https://transistor.fm) https://feeds.transistor.fm/the-search-space The Logic Programming podcast. About the history, future, and wider landscape of Logic Programming. © Holmgren Interstellar, 2024 1c6a7fb1-e5d1-5fca-937b-af4e66ade3ac no Support this podcast Trailer en Wed, 23 Jul 2025 07:37:12 -0700 Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:55:51 -0800 http://thesearch.space https://img.transistor.fm/JM9SJOSV26WmJzIGsw1La6nN-GN7wQZy1mZrrHL8D3U/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:1400/h:1400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/Lzc5MDMvMTU4Nzcx/OTIxNi1hcnR3b3Jr/LmpwZw.jpg The Search Space http://thesearch.space episodic Felix Holmgren The Logic Programming podcast. About the history, future, and wider landscape of Logic Programming. The Logic Programming podcast. logic programming, logic, programming, prolog, philosophy, natural language understanding, NLP, artificial intelligence Felix Holmgren No No #6 - Adam Smith on Answer Set Programming 6 6 #6 - Adam Smith on Answer Set Programming full 2220486f-f30e-49ae-9418-b376d0aae7f1 https://share.transistor.fm/s/50769725 Adam Smith talks about Answer Set Programming, and how he's used it in game design and other areas.

Visit the show's web page: thesearch.space

Show notes

| Torsten Schaub at Potsdam University

Several of his presentations contain the formula

ASP = DB + LP + KR + SMT^n

ASP: Answer Set Programming
DB: Database
LP: Logic Programming
KR: Knowledge Representation
SMT: SAT Modulo Theories

SAT solver: Boolean Satisfiability

| this refraction game that I had made a puzzle generator for

Described in Adam's dissertation.

| the Potassco tools from University of Potsdam.

potassco.org

| A book called Procedural Content Generation in Games

www.pcgbook.com

| There's this idea due to Kate Compton ... of the 10 000 bowls of oatmeal problem

http://www.galaxykate.com/blog/generator.html

| We modeled a design space of information visualizations, line plots and scatter plots and bar charts

"Formalizing Visualization Design Knowledge as Constraints: Actionable and Extensible Models in Draco"

| a Python library called Clorm .. so that you can define your problem instances with Python objects

github.com/potassco/clorm

| the concept of elaboration tolerance that when someone gives you some clarification about how your domain works, can you incorporate that change by just adding more code to add more choices or more constraints?

John McCarthy's paper on elaboration tolerance

| a paper from Google DeepMind ... describing a system called the Apperception Engine

"Making sense of sensory input", Evans et al

| taught a class called Applied ASP a few years ago

Lecture slides, programming assignments, reading assignments here: canvas.ucsc.edu/courses/1338

| Once you want to write a program that's more than 30 lines long, how do you profile it? How do you test it? How do you deploy it?

Slides from a talk about Adam's test automation framework: Unit Test Automation for ASP with Ansunit

Try ASP from your browser: https://potassco.org/clingo/run/

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Adam Smith talks about Answer Set Programming, and how he's used it in game design and other areas.

Visit the show's web page: thesearch.space

Show notes

| Torsten Schaub at Potsdam University

Several of his presentations contain the formula

ASP = DB + LP + KR + SMT^n

ASP: Answer Set Programming
DB: Database
LP: Logic Programming
KR: Knowledge Representation
SMT: SAT Modulo Theories

SAT solver: Boolean Satisfiability

| this refraction game that I had made a puzzle generator for

Described in Adam's dissertation.

| the Potassco tools from University of Potsdam.

potassco.org

| A book called Procedural Content Generation in Games

www.pcgbook.com

| There's this idea due to Kate Compton ... of the 10 000 bowls of oatmeal problem

http://www.galaxykate.com/blog/generator.html

| We modeled a design space of information visualizations, line plots and scatter plots and bar charts

"Formalizing Visualization Design Knowledge as Constraints: Actionable and Extensible Models in Draco"

| a Python library called Clorm .. so that you can define your problem instances with Python objects

github.com/potassco/clorm

| the concept of elaboration tolerance that when someone gives you some clarification about how your domain works, can you incorporate that change by just adding more code to add more choices or more constraints?

John McCarthy's paper on elaboration tolerance

| a paper from Google DeepMind ... describing a system called the Apperception Engine

"Making sense of sensory input", Evans et al

| taught a class called Applied ASP a few years ago

Lecture slides, programming assignments, reading assignments here: canvas.ucsc.edu/courses/1338

| Once you want to write a program that's more than 30 lines long, how do you profile it? How do you test it? How do you deploy it?

Slides from a talk about Adam's test automation framework: Unit Test Automation for ASP with Ansunit

Try ASP from your browser: https://potassco.org/clingo/run/

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Wed, 14 Feb 2024 18:09:59 -0800 Felix Holmgren Felix Holmgren 4408 Adam Smith talks about Answer Set Programming, and how he's used it in game design and other areas.

Visit the show's web page: thesearch.space

Show notes

| Torsten Schaub at Potsdam University

Several of his presentations contain the formula

ASP = DB + LP + KR + SMT^n

ASP: Answer Set Programming
DB: Database
LP: Logic Programming
KR: Knowledge Representation
SMT: SAT Modulo Theories

SAT solver: Boolean Satisfiability

| this refraction game that I had made a puzzle generator for

Described in Adam's dissertation.

| the Potassco tools from University of Potsdam.

potassco.org

| A book called Procedural Content Generation in Games

www.pcgbook.com

| There's this idea due to Kate Compton ... of the 10 000 bowls of oatmeal problem

http://www.galaxykate.com/blog/generator.html

| We modeled a design space of information visualizations, line plots and scatter plots and bar charts

"Formalizing Visualization Design Knowledge as Constraints: Actionable and Extensible Models in Draco"

| a Python library called Clorm .. so that you can define your problem instances with Python objects

github.com/potassco/clorm

| the concept of elaboration tolerance that when someone gives you some clarification about how your domain works, can you incorporate that change by just adding more code to add more choices or more constraints?

John McCarthy's paper on elaboration tolerance

| a paper from Google DeepMind ... describing a system called the Apperception Engine

"Making sense of sensory input", Evans et al

| taught a class called Applied ASP a few years ago

Lecture slides, programming assignments, reading assignments here: canvas.ucsc.edu/courses/1338

| Once you want to write a program that's more than 30 lines long, how do you profile it? How do you test it? How do you deploy it?

Slides from a talk about Adam's test automation framework: Unit Test Automation for ASP with Ansunit

Try ASP from your browser: https://potassco.org/clingo/run/

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> logic programming, answer set programming, constraint programming, game design No #5 - Kevin Feeney on TerminusDb and the Semantic Web 5 5 #5 - Kevin Feeney on TerminusDb and the Semantic Web full 2d6afc37-8eb6-42c2-8a0e-63585453185a https://share.transistor.fm/s/0a6f8c20 Visit the show's web page: thesearch.space

Show notes

I first became aware of Kevin through a series of blog posts that explain the similarities and differences between these different kinds of databases

Graph Fundamentals — Part 1: RDF

Graph Fundamentals — Part 2: Labelled Property Graphs

Graph Fundamentals — Part 3: Graph Schema Languages

Graph Fundamentals Part 4: Linked Data

Then I found out about TerminusDb

https://terminusdb.com/

"a bunch of Swedish hackers with a bunch of JSON blobs"

https://neo4j.com/

Full quote:

[...] there have been many more incoherent standards and initiatives that have come out of the W3C’s standards bodies — almost all of which have  launched like lead balloons into a world that cares not a jot.  Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that, hidden in all the  nonsense, there are some exceptionally good ideas — triples, URL  identifiers and OWL itself are all tremendously good ideas in essence  and nothing else out there comes close. It is a sad testament to the  suffocating nature of design by standards committee which has consumed  countless hours of many thousands of smart and genuine researchers, that ultimately the entire community ended up getting it’s ass kicked by a  bunch of Swedish hackers with a bunch of json blobs — the Neo4j property graph guys have had a greater impact upon the real world than the whole academic edifice of semantic web research.


The Semantic Web as a movement came out of Tim Berners-Lee

One of the seminal articles:

https://web.archive.org/web/20171010210556/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/566c/1c6bd366b4c9e07fc37eb372771690d5ba31.pdf

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. ... Adding logic to the Web—the means to use rules to make inferences, choose courses of action and answer questions—is the task before the Semantic Web community at the moment.

      — May 17, 2001, The Semantic Web - A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila 

The standardization of RDF, the standardization of OWL


the big, big gap in a lot of the standards of the semantic web was some type of closed world reasoning regime


I was one of the developers of software that ran a thing called Indymedia back in the early two-thousands.


most of the impetus for OWL came out of the description logic community

...there's a number of very well-known and very accomplished description logic people [...] like Peter Patel-Schneider and [Ian] Horrocks in Oxford.


...they were using predicates to point out that two things, two data structures are the same thing. But the standard didn't ... mean for that to be used for things that just happened to be the same real world thing...

Kevin discusses this misuse of owl:sameAs and owl:equivalentClass in the the fourth of his blog posts linked to above.

I was talking to some of the guys in Semantic Arts, who are very busy and active consultants in the area.


And then there is this thing called RDF stores...


[RDF stores] are based around this concept of a triple - predicate subject object


Just like Google do actually on their front page now for their knowledge graph

The Google Knowledge Graph was introduced in 2012 with the great slogan "things, not strings"

...the other thing that triples have ... is it makes revision controlled databases possible. 

From TerminusDB: A Technical History:

...we adopted a delta encoding approach to updates as is used in source control systems such as git. This provides transaction processing and  updates using immutable database data structures, recovering standard  database management features while also providing the whole suite of  revision control features: branch, merge, squash, rollback, blame, and  time-travel...


I've actually seen that very thing being described as a benefit of property graphs that each relation has its own ID and it can have [a] whole data structure associated with it

See for example neo4j's blog post RDF Triple Stores vs. Labeled Property Graphs: What’s the Difference?, in the section "Difference #1: RDF Does Not Uniquely Identify Instances of Relationships of the Same Type".

You can do it in SQL these days, but it's sort of a later addition... the WITH syntax, Common Table Expressions they are called... you can actually do recursive queries. 

I once showed up at a neo4j meetup with some examples of doing graphy queries in PostgreSQL using Common Table Expressions. (The presentation would have been more impressive if I had but some indexes on those tables...) A way better introduction is the excellent page on The WITH Clause in the SQLite documentation.

People beat up on normal-form modeling and SQL way more than they should.

A good recent blog post on this topic: Normalization is not a process.

Even when I'm modelling graph stuff, I start off with basically ]]> Visit the show's web page: thesearch.space

Show notes

I first became aware of Kevin through a series of blog posts that explain the similarities and differences between these different kinds of databases

Graph Fundamentals — Part 1: RDF

Graph Fundamentals — Part 2: Labelled Property Graphs

Graph Fundamentals — Part 3: Graph Schema Languages

Graph Fundamentals Part 4: Linked Data

Then I found out about TerminusDb

https://terminusdb.com/

"a bunch of Swedish hackers with a bunch of JSON blobs"

https://neo4j.com/

Full quote:

[...] there have been many more incoherent standards and initiatives that have come out of the W3C’s standards bodies — almost all of which have  launched like lead balloons into a world that cares not a jot.  Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that, hidden in all the  nonsense, there are some exceptionally good ideas — triples, URL  identifiers and OWL itself are all tremendously good ideas in essence  and nothing else out there comes close. It is a sad testament to the  suffocating nature of design by standards committee which has consumed  countless hours of many thousands of smart and genuine researchers, that ultimately the entire community ended up getting it’s ass kicked by a  bunch of Swedish hackers with a bunch of json blobs — the Neo4j property graph guys have had a greater impact upon the real world than the whole academic edifice of semantic web research.


The Semantic Web as a movement came out of Tim Berners-Lee

One of the seminal articles:

https://web.archive.org/web/20171010210556/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/566c/1c6bd366b4c9e07fc37eb372771690d5ba31.pdf

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. ... Adding logic to the Web—the means to use rules to make inferences, choose courses of action and answer questions—is the task before the Semantic Web community at the moment.

      — May 17, 2001, The Semantic Web - A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila 

The standardization of RDF, the standardization of OWL


the big, big gap in a lot of the standards of the semantic web was some type of closed world reasoning regime


I was one of the developers of software that ran a thing called Indymedia back in the early two-thousands.


most of the impetus for OWL came out of the description logic community

...there's a number of very well-known and very accomplished description logic people [...] like Peter Patel-Schneider and [Ian] Horrocks in Oxford.


...they were using predicates to point out that two things, two data structures are the same thing. But the standard didn't ... mean for that to be used for things that just happened to be the same real world thing...

Kevin discusses this misuse of owl:sameAs and owl:equivalentClass in the the fourth of his blog posts linked to above.

I was talking to some of the guys in Semantic Arts, who are very busy and active consultants in the area.


And then there is this thing called RDF stores...


[RDF stores] are based around this concept of a triple - predicate subject object


Just like Google do actually on their front page now for their knowledge graph

The Google Knowledge Graph was introduced in 2012 with the great slogan "things, not strings"

...the other thing that triples have ... is it makes revision controlled databases possible. 

From TerminusDB: A Technical History:

...we adopted a delta encoding approach to updates as is used in source control systems such as git. This provides transaction processing and  updates using immutable database data structures, recovering standard  database management features while also providing the whole suite of  revision control features: branch, merge, squash, rollback, blame, and  time-travel...


I've actually seen that very thing being described as a benefit of property graphs that each relation has its own ID and it can have [a] whole data structure associated with it

See for example neo4j's blog post RDF Triple Stores vs. Labeled Property Graphs: What’s the Difference?, in the section "Difference #1: RDF Does Not Uniquely Identify Instances of Relationships of the Same Type".

You can do it in SQL these days, but it's sort of a later addition... the WITH syntax, Common Table Expressions they are called... you can actually do recursive queries. 

I once showed up at a neo4j meetup with some examples of doing graphy queries in PostgreSQL using Common Table Expressions. (The presentation would have been more impressive if I had but some indexes on those tables...) A way better introduction is the excellent page on The WITH Clause in the SQLite documentation.

People beat up on normal-form modeling and SQL way more than they should.

A good recent blog post on this topic: Normalization is not a process.

Even when I'm modelling graph stuff, I start off with basically ]]> Sun, 20 Mar 2022 16:10:51 -0700 Felix Holmgren Felix Holmgren 5227 Kevin Feeney talks about different kinds of graph databases, the role of logic in the Semantic Web vision, the shortcomings the technologies created to fulfill that vision, and how TerminusDb, the database project Kevin co-founded, is seeking to finally make good on the promise of the Semantic Web. Kevin Feeney talks about different kinds of graph databases, the role of logic in the Semantic Web vision, the shortcomings the technologies created to fulfill that vision, and how TerminusDb, the database project Kevin co-founded, is seeking to finally m logic programming, logic, semantic web, terminusdb, databases, semantic technologies No #4 - Markus Triska on constraints and the power of Prolog 4 4 #4 - Markus Triska on constraints and the power of Prolog full 1749fda8-ac5c-4525-8286-7309ae8b5529 https://share.transistor.fm/s/29428c9f Visit the show's web page: thesearch.space

Show notes

The Power of Prolog, Markus' ongoing book project

"It says, 'Find your way from darkness to light,' which is one of the quotes that occurs in The Knight of Cups, which is a recent movie by Terrence Malick."


"I was introduced to Prolog by Ulrich Neumerkel at the Vienna University of Technology."


 "the convener of the Prolog ISO standard group."


"He has developed his own teaching environment called GUPU, which means talk-assisted programming environment [Gesprächsunterstützende Programmierübungsumgebung]."


Declarative program development in Prolog with GUPU (paper)

"one fellow student came to me and asked for a solution to [what] you may now know as the SEND MORE MONEY task."

SEND + MORE = MONEY

"People have ... in different languages, explored multi-dispatch, multi-methods, and all kinds of stuff."


"... the notion that an algorithm can be decomposed into a logic aspect and a control aspect. So this is written as 'algorithm is logic plus control.'"


"...let's look at the HTTP framework of SWI-Prolog"


"...the first use case that Prolog should solve was translating weather reports between French and English. It was the METEO system..."


 "For this purpose ... DCGs were invented. So this is a sub-formalism in Prolog that lets us describe lists in a very natural way."


"...you have kind of a special syntax with the keyword is, and many of the normal, nice properties of Prolog start breaking down."

(is)/2  is not actually a keyword or a special syntax. Markus describes the issues involved very well here:

https://github.com/triska/clpz#an-impure-alternative-low-level-integer-arithmetic

and here:

https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/clpz

 "It is abbreviated as CSP: Constraint Satisfaction Problem."


"You have variables, you have associated domains, which in plain Prolog are always Herbrand terms, named after Jaques Herbrand."


"In the literature, this has even been mentioned as the Holy Grail of computer science. This property [or] at least the idea that users or application programmers specify a task and the system solves it."


Eugene  C  Freuder.  “In  pursuit  of  the  holy  grail”.  In:Constraints 2.1 (1997), pp. 57–61. (not freely available)

There is an ongoing series of workshops following up on the ideas in the original paper:

https://freuder.wordpress.com/pthg-20-the-fourth-workshop-on-progress-towards-the-holy-grail/

"For comparison, [...] the constraint solver for SICStus Prolog is hundreds of times faster than for example what I've implemented."


> "rusty-wam, implemented in Rust"
(hence renamed Scryer Prolog, with Markus being an active contributor)

> "There is O-Prolog, which is implemented by Kenichi Sasagawa from Japan."

> "..in the case of Tau Prolog, it's implemented in JavaScript and they can embed Prolog in a web browser"


The Power of Prolog YouTube channel

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Visit the show's web page: thesearch.space

Show notes

The Power of Prolog, Markus' ongoing book project

"It says, 'Find your way from darkness to light,' which is one of the quotes that occurs in The Knight of Cups, which is a recent movie by Terrence Malick."


"I was introduced to Prolog by Ulrich Neumerkel at the Vienna University of Technology."


 "the convener of the Prolog ISO standard group."


"He has developed his own teaching environment called GUPU, which means talk-assisted programming environment [Gesprächsunterstützende Programmierübungsumgebung]."


Declarative program development in Prolog with GUPU (paper)

"one fellow student came to me and asked for a solution to [what] you may now know as the SEND MORE MONEY task."

SEND + MORE = MONEY

"People have ... in different languages, explored multi-dispatch, multi-methods, and all kinds of stuff."


"... the notion that an algorithm can be decomposed into a logic aspect and a control aspect. So this is written as 'algorithm is logic plus control.'"


"...let's look at the HTTP framework of SWI-Prolog"


"...the first use case that Prolog should solve was translating weather reports between French and English. It was the METEO system..."


 "For this purpose ... DCGs were invented. So this is a sub-formalism in Prolog that lets us describe lists in a very natural way."


"...you have kind of a special syntax with the keyword is, and many of the normal, nice properties of Prolog start breaking down."

(is)/2  is not actually a keyword or a special syntax. Markus describes the issues involved very well here:

https://github.com/triska/clpz#an-impure-alternative-low-level-integer-arithmetic

and here:

https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/clpz

 "It is abbreviated as CSP: Constraint Satisfaction Problem."


"You have variables, you have associated domains, which in plain Prolog are always Herbrand terms, named after Jaques Herbrand."


"In the literature, this has even been mentioned as the Holy Grail of computer science. This property [or] at least the idea that users or application programmers specify a task and the system solves it."


Eugene  C  Freuder.  “In  pursuit  of  the  holy  grail”.  In:Constraints 2.1 (1997), pp. 57–61. (not freely available)

There is an ongoing series of workshops following up on the ideas in the original paper:

https://freuder.wordpress.com/pthg-20-the-fourth-workshop-on-progress-towards-the-holy-grail/

"For comparison, [...] the constraint solver for SICStus Prolog is hundreds of times faster than for example what I've implemented."


> "rusty-wam, implemented in Rust"
(hence renamed Scryer Prolog, with Markus being an active contributor)

> "There is O-Prolog, which is implemented by Kenichi Sasagawa from Japan."

> "..in the case of Tau Prolog, it's implemented in JavaScript and they can embed Prolog in a web browser"


The Power of Prolog YouTube channel

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Sun, 03 Jan 2021 16:41:40 -0800 Felix Holmgren Felix Holmgren 3956 Markus Triska talks about his work on Constraint Logic Programming packages, writing robust software, modern features of Prolog systems, and the future of logic programming. Markus Triska talks about his work on Constraint Logic Programming packages, writing robust software, modern features of Prolog systems, and the future of logic programming. logic programming, constraint programming, constraint logic programming, Prolog, logic No #3 - Chris Martens on narrative generation 3 3 #3 - Chris Martens on narrative generation full 2ba6704e-719c-4bbb-bf73-10acc3eda10e https://share.transistor.fm/s/8cede1e9 Visit the show's web page: thesearch.space

Show notes

Chris Martens' academic website
https://www.csc.ncsu.edu/people/crmarten

04:30
"Programming Interactive Worlds with Linear Logic", Chris' Ph.D. thesis

06:10
James Meehan’s, Tale-Spin thesis
"The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer"

A great post about the story of Tale-Spin's creation:
https://grandtextauto.soe.ucsc.edu/2006/09/13/the-story-of-meehans-tale-spin/

18:40
The Twelf Project

"a language used to specify, implement, and prove properties of deductive systems such as programming languages and logics"

The dependently typed logif LF


20:50
Linear logic

Jean-Yves Girard

The original paper
(The first sentence begins: "Linear logic is a logic behind logic...")

22:00
"A form of logical implication pronounced A lolly B" ... I wish I had a screen to draw on"
Looks like this:  A -o B  (a modified arrow from A to B)

25:10
The frame problem

25:20
Temporal logic
Event calculus

26:50
Pandemic board game

"5% of my design royalty for Pandemic products is donated directly to Doctors Without Borders"

https://www.leacock.com/about

44:40
Interactive fiction

"software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment"

https://www.ifarchive.org/

47:30
Behavior trees

56:00
R. Michael Young

"His research focuses on the development of computational models of interactive narrative with applications to computer games, educational and training systems and virtual environments."


57:30
https://twitter.com/chrisamaphone
github.com/chrisamaphone

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Visit the show's web page: thesearch.space

Show notes

Chris Martens' academic website
https://www.csc.ncsu.edu/people/crmarten

04:30
"Programming Interactive Worlds with Linear Logic", Chris' Ph.D. thesis

06:10
James Meehan’s, Tale-Spin thesis
"The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer"

A great post about the story of Tale-Spin's creation:
https://grandtextauto.soe.ucsc.edu/2006/09/13/the-story-of-meehans-tale-spin/

18:40
The Twelf Project

"a language used to specify, implement, and prove properties of deductive systems such as programming languages and logics"

The dependently typed logif LF


20:50
Linear logic

Jean-Yves Girard

The original paper
(The first sentence begins: "Linear logic is a logic behind logic...")

22:00
"A form of logical implication pronounced A lolly B" ... I wish I had a screen to draw on"
Looks like this:  A -o B  (a modified arrow from A to B)

25:10
The frame problem

25:20
Temporal logic
Event calculus

26:50
Pandemic board game

"5% of my design royalty for Pandemic products is donated directly to Doctors Without Borders"

https://www.leacock.com/about

44:40
Interactive fiction

"software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment"

https://www.ifarchive.org/

47:30
Behavior trees

56:00
R. Michael Young

"His research focuses on the development of computational models of interactive narrative with applications to computer games, educational and training systems and virtual environments."


57:30
https://twitter.com/chrisamaphone
github.com/chrisamaphone

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Sun, 23 Aug 2020 02:19:44 -0700 Felix Holmgren Felix Holmgren 3634 Chris Martens talks about using linear logic programming to generate interactive narratives, and various ways to apply logic to games and digital arts. Chris Martens talks about using linear logic programming to generate interactive narratives, and various ways to apply logic to games and digital arts. logic programming, logic, interactive fiction, linear logic, prolog, programming No #2 - Ryan Brush on retaking rules for developers 2 2 #2 - Ryan Brush on retaking rules for developers full 86e7b7dc-a149-43d3-aa6d-3b3b4b9ca1c5 https://share.transistor.fm/s/cbda60a4 Show notes (full notes coming up, please check back soon)

Ryan's talk about Clara at Strange Loop (2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6oVuYmRgkk


https://github.com/quoll/naga
https://github.com/ulfurinn/wongi-engine
https://github.com/jruizgit/rules

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Show notes (full notes coming up, please check back soon)

Ryan's talk about Clara at Strange Loop (2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6oVuYmRgkk


https://github.com/quoll/naga
https://github.com/ulfurinn/wongi-engine
https://github.com/jruizgit/rules

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Mon, 08 Jun 2020 05:00:00 -0700 Felix Holmgren Felix Holmgren 2967 Ryan Brush talks about Clara, a rules engine written in Clojure, and how to close the semantic gap between specification and implementation. Ryan Brush talks about Clara, a rules engine written in Clojure, and how to close the semantic gap between specification and implementation. logic programming, logic, rule engine, rules engine, clojure, production rules No #1 - The Poet of Logic Programming 1 1 #1 - The Poet of Logic Programming full d79dab25-9856-480a-be7a-1b9034f18d87 https://share.transistor.fm/s/0882fff6 Show notes

08:10
John Alan Robinson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Alan_Robinson

Computational Logic: Memories of the Past and Challenges for the Future
http://www.computational-logic.org/iccl/downloads/Robinson-CL2000.pdf

Maarten van Emden has great material about Robinson, including two interviews:

  • https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/alan-robinson/
  • https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/interview-with-alan-robinson-inventor-of-resolution-logic/
  • http://aarinc.org/Newsletters/089-2010-10.html#robinson


08:55
The Early Years of Logic Programming (Kowalski)
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/the%20early%20years.pdf

12:05
The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/British%20Nationality%20Act.pdf

12:45
Horn clause logic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_clause

14:32
Dual process theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

16:30
Alternatives to logic representations of knowledge

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And%E2%80%93or_tree
  • https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/History.pdf


17:10
Minsky’s frames
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence)

17:30
Non-monotonic logic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic

18:10
First-order logic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic

20:45
List concatenation (the append/3 predicate)
http://www.learnprolognow.org/lpnpage.php?pagetype=html&pageid=lpn-htmlse24

23:55
Datalog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog

Answer Set Programming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_set_programming

25:50
Cordell Green
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordell_Green

26:50
"it was Cordell who was interested in knowledge representation"

STANFORD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROJECT, MEMO Al-96
The Application of Theorem Proving to Question-Answering Systems
https://www.kestrel.edu/home/people/green/publications/green-thesis.pdf

Theorem-Proving by Resolution as a Basis for Question-Answering Systems
https://www.kestrel.edu/home/people/green/publications/theorem-proving.pdf

29:50
Planner, Hewitt, Winograd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planner_(programming_language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Winograd

35:00
Monads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)

40:10
Alain Colmerauer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer

Un Systeme de Communication Homme-Machine en Francais
http://alain.colmerauer.free.fr/alcol/ArchivesPublications/HommeMachineFr/HoMa.pdf

42:00
Pat Hayes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Hayes
https://www.ihmc.us/groups/phayes/

43:15
The Birth of Prolog (Alain Colmerauer and Philippe Roussel)
http://alain.colmerauer.free.fr/alcol/ArchivesPublications/PrologHistory/19november92.pdf

46:00
Computational Logic and Human Thinking: How to be Artificially Intelligent
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/newbook.pdf

49:00
The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking (Barbara Minto)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1990595.The_Pyramid_Principle

51:00
Unification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_(computer_science)

52:20
Backtracking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtracking

56:10
Production rules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_system_(computer_science)

57:10
Expert systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_systems

01:08:30
The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer

1:09:50
MapReduce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce

1:17:00
Event calculus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_calculus

1:18:20
Logic Production Systems
http://lps.doc.ic.ac.uk/

1:19:40
Logical Contracts (company)
http://logicalcontracts.com/

1:29:45
Minsky's attack on the perceptron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Show notes

08:10
John Alan Robinson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Alan_Robinson

Computational Logic: Memories of the Past and Challenges for the Future
http://www.computational-logic.org/iccl/downloads/Robinson-CL2000.pdf

Maarten van Emden has great material about Robinson, including two interviews:

  • https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/alan-robinson/
  • https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/interview-with-alan-robinson-inventor-of-resolution-logic/
  • http://aarinc.org/Newsletters/089-2010-10.html#robinson


08:55
The Early Years of Logic Programming (Kowalski)
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/the%20early%20years.pdf

12:05
The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/British%20Nationality%20Act.pdf

12:45
Horn clause logic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_clause

14:32
Dual process theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

16:30
Alternatives to logic representations of knowledge

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And%E2%80%93or_tree
  • https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/History.pdf


17:10
Minsky’s frames
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence)

17:30
Non-monotonic logic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic

18:10
First-order logic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic

20:45
List concatenation (the append/3 predicate)
http://www.learnprolognow.org/lpnpage.php?pagetype=html&pageid=lpn-htmlse24

23:55
Datalog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog

Answer Set Programming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_set_programming

25:50
Cordell Green
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordell_Green

26:50
"it was Cordell who was interested in knowledge representation"

STANFORD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROJECT, MEMO Al-96
The Application of Theorem Proving to Question-Answering Systems
https://www.kestrel.edu/home/people/green/publications/green-thesis.pdf

Theorem-Proving by Resolution as a Basis for Question-Answering Systems
https://www.kestrel.edu/home/people/green/publications/theorem-proving.pdf

29:50
Planner, Hewitt, Winograd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planner_(programming_language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Winograd

35:00
Monads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)

40:10
Alain Colmerauer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer

Un Systeme de Communication Homme-Machine en Francais
http://alain.colmerauer.free.fr/alcol/ArchivesPublications/HommeMachineFr/HoMa.pdf

42:00
Pat Hayes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Hayes
https://www.ihmc.us/groups/phayes/

43:15
The Birth of Prolog (Alain Colmerauer and Philippe Roussel)
http://alain.colmerauer.free.fr/alcol/ArchivesPublications/PrologHistory/19november92.pdf

46:00
Computational Logic and Human Thinking: How to be Artificially Intelligent
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/newbook.pdf

49:00
The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking (Barbara Minto)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1990595.The_Pyramid_Principle

51:00
Unification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_(computer_science)

52:20
Backtracking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtracking

56:10
Production rules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_system_(computer_science)

57:10
Expert systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_systems

01:08:30
The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer

1:09:50
MapReduce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce

1:17:00
Event calculus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_calculus

1:18:20
Logic Production Systems
http://lps.doc.ic.ac.uk/

1:19:40
Logical Contracts (company)
http://logicalcontracts.com/

1:29:45
Minsky's attack on the perceptron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2020 02:00:00 -0700 Felix Holmgren Felix Holmgren 5753 An interview with Robert Kowalski, the co-creator of the field of logic programming and of the language Prolog. The conversation ranges over the history of Prolog, the ill-famed Fifth Generation Computer Systems project, the relation between symbolic AI and connectionist AI including deep learning, why rule engines fail at logic, and the future of logic programming. Find show notes and more on thesearch.space, and follow the show on Twitter: @searchspacepod An interview with Robert Kowalski, the co-creator of the field of logic programming and of the language Prolog. The conversation ranges over the history of Prolog, the ill-famed Fifth Generation Computer Systems project, the relation between symbolic AI a logic programming, programming, logic, prolog, robert kowalski, artificial intelligence, symbolic ai, declarative programming No Trailer Trailer trailer fb4eea10-ff3a-4cfc-9db0-42cb7a50b491 https://share.transistor.fm/s/a051adf3 Logic Programming, you say? That might sound like either an oxymoron or a tautology to you, depending on who you are. If you have heard about Logic Programming before, you are probably thinking about Prolog - a programming language that is almost 50 years old, and which many find fascinating but also frustratingly limited.

What is logic? Many people consider it synonymous with dry intellect, humorless bureaucracy, the opposite of creativity. But in my understanding, logic is an attempt to capture the essence of thought, which is to say the essence of what we humans find reasonable, persuasive, and possible. The study of logic goes straight to some of our fundamental intuitions about the world and ourselves, and it's really not clear at all what they are rooted in. People have lots of different opinions about this. Logic looks very clear-cut on the surface, but when you dig you bump into some of the deepest perennial questions in philosophy. And this doesn't change when we arrive at modern, formalized logic, which sort of looks like mathematics - you are still dealing with deep questions about human psychology and cognition, and how we perceive the physical world.

Now, it turns out formal logic can be used as a programming language. If you are careful about which parts of logic you use, and in which form you write things down, formal logic fits very well with how programming languages are executed. So you can write down some logical formulas, and you get two interpretations: the logical interpretation, and the procedural interpretation which is how you run it on a computer. And these two are, let's say, in sync - you get the deductions you would expect from both interpretations.

As a programming paradigm, this has some really unusual and fun features, and since logic in the first place is, again, an attempt to capture the essence of human though, Logic Programming is in many respects very intuitive. To me, it's the closest to what I imagined programming would be like when I was 10 and had just started to understand that there was a way to tell computers what to do.

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Logic Programming, you say? That might sound like either an oxymoron or a tautology to you, depending on who you are. If you have heard about Logic Programming before, you are probably thinking about Prolog - a programming language that is almost 50 years old, and which many find fascinating but also frustratingly limited.

What is logic? Many people consider it synonymous with dry intellect, humorless bureaucracy, the opposite of creativity. But in my understanding, logic is an attempt to capture the essence of thought, which is to say the essence of what we humans find reasonable, persuasive, and possible. The study of logic goes straight to some of our fundamental intuitions about the world and ourselves, and it's really not clear at all what they are rooted in. People have lots of different opinions about this. Logic looks very clear-cut on the surface, but when you dig you bump into some of the deepest perennial questions in philosophy. And this doesn't change when we arrive at modern, formalized logic, which sort of looks like mathematics - you are still dealing with deep questions about human psychology and cognition, and how we perceive the physical world.

Now, it turns out formal logic can be used as a programming language. If you are careful about which parts of logic you use, and in which form you write things down, formal logic fits very well with how programming languages are executed. So you can write down some logical formulas, and you get two interpretations: the logical interpretation, and the procedural interpretation which is how you run it on a computer. And these two are, let's say, in sync - you get the deductions you would expect from both interpretations.

As a programming paradigm, this has some really unusual and fun features, and since logic in the first place is, again, an attempt to capture the essence of human though, Logic Programming is in many respects very intuitive. To me, it's the closest to what I imagined programming would be like when I was 10 and had just started to understand that there was a way to tell computers what to do.

★ Support this podcast ★ ]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2020 06:00:00 -0800 Felix Holmgren Felix Holmgren 353 Felix introduces the podcast and briefly explains what logic programming is. Felix introduces the podcast and briefly explains what logic programming is. logic programming, logic, programming, prolog, philosophy, natural language understanding, NLP, artificial intelligence No