IT: What is Prolog in AI?

What is Prolog in AI?

Prolog stands for Programming in logic. It is logic programming language used in artificial intelligence programming . It has important role in artificial intelligence. Unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily as a declarative programming language. In prolog, logic is expressed as relations (called as Facts and Rules). Core heart of prolog lies at the logic being applied.

Formulation or Computation is carried out by running a query over these relations.

Prolog is a programming language centred around a small set of basic mechanisms, including pattern matching, tree-based data structuring and automatic backtracking. This small set constitutes a surprisingly powerful and flexible programming framework.

Prolog is especially well suited for problems that involve objects - in particular, structured objects - and relations between them. For example, it is an easy exercise in Prolog to express spatial relationships between objects, such as the blue sphere is behind the green one. It is also easy to state a more general rule: if object X is closer to the observer than object Y, and Y is closer than Z, then X must be closer than Z. Prolog can now reason about the spatial relationships and their consistency with respect to the general rule. Features like this make Prolog a powerful language for artificial intelligence (AI) and non-numerical programming in general. There are well-known examples of symbolic computation whose implementation in other standard languages took tens of pages of indigestible code. When the same algorithms were implemented in Prolog, the result was a crystal-clear program easily fitting on one page.