Fellow Prolog/AI Enthusiasts, Legatees & Traditionalists:
Making a simulator for training sounds fascinating. I gather that it will be a stand-alone application, something to run on a local client machine using a command line or graphical user interface.
Though this project, and ones like it are important and worthy, I am obsessed with one aspect of Prolog: its virtual absence from corportate information technology.
The power of Prolog in making expert systems would be immeasurably useful in those areas where deterministic procedural languages have ruled traditionally. It is a widely known secret that chaos and imprecision abound in these traditional or legacy systems. Ignorance of how an extensive set large applications is put together leads to failures on the one hand, or to a reluctance to take on new opportunities. My 25 years in this profession have been one long struggle to see through the fog of information systems.
An expert system with knowledge of tables, programs, fields, columns, classes, types, systems, departments and applications, etc. would save the day, and an independent continuously running Prolog server should be the foundation of an expert system to develop applications.
In this capacity Prolog should behave just like an SQL database server. Prolog is indeed a database server of facts and inferences already. And, thus, a C++ program or a COBOL program could make requests as a client from where it runs to a Prolog server and receive replies, the same sort of dialog that occurs between a standard application and an SQL server, for instance.
A Prolog server could be identical to an SQL server, except for the form of the content in the exchanges: instead of sending SQL and receiving record sets, a Prolog savvy application would send well-formed Prolog strings and receive instantiated variables or lists of solutions.
A relationship between the non-determinism and rich structures of a Prolog system, and the deterministic and rigid structures of traditional applications is complementary, necessary and natural. The possibilities I find exciting and too numerous to speculate on in this space, what should be a brief e-mail.
Is there such a thing as a Prolog server as I have tried to describe it? Or, does someone want to make one and make this a better world?
Sincerely,
Lloyd Blunden 360-792-2212, Bremerton, Washington, West Coast USA
--- Denis Medvedev <a_mdl(a)mail.ru> wrote:
Hello,
I am interested too!
I am now a head of a solutions department of a computer manufacturer company in which we are producing complete hardware/software solutions, some for educational purposes.
We are packaging opensource software, make configurations, tuning and configuration managers/wizards, do preinstalls and sell that products either as is or in projects.
One thing we are now "in" is an education support system. That system delivers content and means of organizing content (webpages, knowledge, forums, chat, means of video editing). Adding "brains" to this system can really help. The system is web-based and uses PHP as its primary language. It's rather easy to add
ciao with pillow as a midlevel reasoning level - but I actually don't know what exactly that layer will do? Gather "hint" iformation from pages and suggest related info? Do web searches based on current viewed content? Analyze forum messages and test results to produce some hint pages? Any more ideas?
Denis Medvedev
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